Prosecutor vs. Felon

                       

                        By Richard C. Gross

                        “Fall if you will, but rise you must.”

                                    --James Joyce (1882-1941) Irish novelist, poet, literary critic

                                    Vice President Kamala Harris, newly minted presidential contender, is everything Donald Trump isn’t – middle-aged vs. old, a freedom fighter vs. a would-be dictator and a practitioner of the law vs. a convicted criminal.

                                    She was off and running at her debut rally in battleground Wisconsin merely two days after President Joe Biden succumbed to enormous pressure from members of his own Democratic Party to resign from his candidacy for a second term, probably his most difficult heartrending political decision.

                                    The about face supercharged hopes for victory to keep the White House for the Democrats with an enormous outpouring of enthusiasm for Harris from a roaring crowd of thousands at a suburban Milwaukee high school. A new Reuters/Ipso poll showed the race between Harris and Trump is a tossup, 43 percent for the vice president, 42 percent for the felon.

                                    A similar poll previously put Trump at 43 percent, Biden at 41 percent. Most polls had shown the former president leading the incumbent.

                                    Harris’ taking over the top of the ticket has made a dramatic difference for the Democrats, a new ballgame in what had been an enervating contest. Biden followers had a sinking feeling that the race was all but lost to Trump, viewed as a danger to our democracy amid the increasingly autocratic bent of the MAGA party.

                                    Proof: The writing of an 877-page manifesto called Project 2025 headed by the Heritage Foundation. It calls for, among 30 categories, completely banning abortions, cutting Social Security and Medicare, teaching Christian beliefs in public schools, ending climate change protections and marriage equality and Obamacare.

                                    “We are in the process of a second American Revolution,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts told a right-wing cable channel earlier this month. Trump has disavowed it on his social media website:

                                    “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, I have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

                                    He’s lying, as usual.

                                    The standard operating procedure when listening to or reading what Trump says is simple: Don’t believe a word of it. He uttered 30,573 lies during his presidency, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper kept tabs because the sociopath was a daily fountain of misinformation, misleading information and disinformation.

                                    CNN reported that six Trump cabinet secretaries worked on the manifesto and 140 others from his administration were involved with it. About 20 pages were credited to his first deputy chief of staff. Tell me he didn’t know about it or that he wouldn’t put that guideline into effect for his devotee Christian nationalist, racist and white supremacist MAGA followers.

                                    Heritage says it was written for any Republican president, but that’s obviously false. If Trump were to win the presidency, he would be inaugurated in 2025, the year for which the project was named.

                                    “We know we got to take this seriously,” Harris told thousands at the rally. “And can you believe they put that thing in writing?”

                                    Actually, no. It’s so very un-American, as if it were written in Moscow, Beijing or Budapest.

                                    Harris also touched on abortion, a No. 1 topic since the Supreme Court overturned 50 years of having the constitutional right to that choice. The vote killing that right is illustrative of what the right wing can do to us if it has the power – a good reason to keep Trump and his vassals far away from the White House.

                                    “We’ll stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans because we trust women to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris said to what the Post reported as sustained cheers.      

                                    This neo-fascist blueprint for a society considered anathema to a majority of Americans is a major reason we need the energy of a 59-year-old presidential candidate to overwhelm Trump and his stooges like J.D. Vance and to keep the country on the progressive track Biden has revived from the Obama years.

                                    It sure showed at the Harris rally in West Allis, Wis., where the roaring crowd of 3,000 shouted “lock him up” at the mention of Trump’s name and chants of “Ka-ma-la,” the Post reported. Trump urged his crowds in 2016 to shout “lock her up” when referring to Hillary Clinton.

                                    Harris referred to her past positions as a prosecutor in San Francisco, possibly the most liberal city in America, and as attorney general for California, the country’s most populous state. The obvious point was to show her creds against Trump, how she has the background to go after him.

                                    “In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

                                    It’s precisely Harris we need in this grueling game-for-keeps against Republicans. Thom Hartmann labeled all of them grifters since the 1980s presidency of conservative Ronald Reagan.

                                    Harris’ reference of course, was to Trump’s being found guilty of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room, for which he was fined $83.3 million; he was fined $25 million for misleading students at his Trump University; and his conviction on 34 counts of fraud for mishandling his company’s finances to hide an affair with an adult film star from voters.

                                    And this is what millions of Americans want for their president?

                                     It’s really so very hard to believe that so many people can be pulled in by a crook. Yet he has the nerve to call his opponents crooked, as in “Crooked Joe” and “Crooked Kamala.” And nobody combats that. He projects onto others what he is himself.

                                    It’s noteworthy that Harris’ candidacy raked in a record $100 million for her campaign from more than a million donors in about the first 24 hours, the Post reported. In addition, it quoted the campaign as saying it recruited 58,000 new volunteers.

                                    Further, and significantly, the vice president secured enough pledges from Democratic delegates to the Aug. 19 convention in Chicago to secure the nomination for president, according to the Associated Press.

                                    There’s little doubt Trump and his small-minded serfs will switch from having attacked Biden’s age to Harris’ being a woman, Black and of South Asian heritage. He and his MAGA-ites are good at name calling to attract voters who are afraid of woman-power and the beauty of racial diversity in running our country.

                                    Diversity is beautiful.

Richard C. Gross, who covered war and peace in the Middle East and the Pentagon, was foreign editor of United Press International and the opinion page editor of The Baltimore Sun.