With fewer than five days left for one of the most consequential elections of our lifetimes, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump are making their closing arguments for why they should become the 47th president. The campaign is historic on so many levels while also being bizarre.
Black, Asian, both, and back to being Black. Kamala Harris is the first Black woman to be on a major party ticket, but she is not wholly Black in the sense of experiencing life as an American Black woman.
We respect each person's right to self-identify their race. However, this does not absolve us of the editorial obligation to point out variations in her life experiences from someone traditionally Black, such as Stacey Abrams, the two-term Democratic nominee for Georgia governor, or Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts' 7th Congressional District.
Stacey Abrams grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi, and was one of six children in a family dedicated to social justice and public service. Her parents were both ministers, and the family was low-income. Pressley grew up in poverty, being raised primarily by her mother, a social worker, and when Pressly was at Boston University, she left before graduating to support her family financially.
Harris, by contrast, was born to a high-performing, professional, biracial couple: Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian Tamil Brahmin woman who was a distinguished cancer researcher out of UC Berkeley, and Donald Harris, a Jamaican who continues to serve as an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford. When the parents divorced, the father lost custody of the children in court. Kamala was five years old.
The mother raised the children first in California and later in Canada (when Kamala was 12 years old). But Kamala kept her father's last name. When she returned to America at 18, she enrolled at Howard University, a historically Black college and university, cementing her identity as a Black person and pursuing her career as one such. However, when she ran for and won the United States Senate seat from California in 2016, she conveniently identified herself as Asian American to tap into the wallets of the large and wealthy Indian diaspora in the Bay Area.
In 2020, Harris entered the Democratic primary race to become the party's nominee to take on then-President Donald Trump, but she ran as a Black woman. She lost so badly that she dropped out of the contest before winning a single vote. The eventual nominee, Joe Biden, chose Kamala Harris to make history. When they won, Kamala Harris had become the first Black woman to become Vice President of the United States, in a fantastic ascent to political power.
Biden dropped out. The 46th president, Joe Biden, ran in the 2024 Democratic primaries seeking reelection and campaigned across the country for four months, winning over 98% of the delegates. His nomination was assured, yet for the first time in American history a party nominee "voluntarily" agreed to withdraw from the race while well enough to remain President. For historians, nothing more bizarre has happened.
But something even more bizarre happened after all. Biden said that he wanted Kamala Harris to be the nominee. In a matter of days, most Democratic leaders had agreed to support her, and in less than a month, she became the Democratic Party nominee. It was the first time in American history that party leaders selected a nominee outside of a nominating convention. It was the first time in American history that someone who had never won a single vote or delegate suddenly became a major party’s presidential candidate.
Trump, a Nazi-Racist-Fascist-Stalinist pariah to his enemies, is on the cusp of winning again. If Trump becomes President again, he will be making history. Only one former President has returned to win non-consecutive terms—Grover Cleveland in 1892. Cleveland won the presidency for the first time in 1884, lost to Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and returned to win it again in 1892. It is unlikely we will ever see this feat repeated in our lifetimes.
The number of bizarre items on Trump's list is long. He is the only candidate in American history to have been impeached twice while in office and severely attacked since leaving Washington (after he was expelled from social media accounts and the press).
Trump has been the subject of a partisan Congressional investigation for the same reason that he was impeached a second time (double jeopardy, anyone?) and charged with federal crimes.
Trump is the only candidate who has been a target of an FBI raid. He is also the only one who has been fingerprinted, had his mugshot taken, convicted as a felon by a partisan court, and charged with violating racketeering laws, typically reserved to prosecute Mafia and human trafficker types. The State of New York changed its sexual predator laws for only one year to grant statute of limitations exemptions so that an ambitious prosecutor could bring charges.
And we almost forgot. Trump has been shot at, not once, but twice.
According to the Harris campaign, Trump is the incumbent, and she is the challenger. In the most bizarre campaign strategy in memory, Harris is running as an outside challenger to Trump, whom she casts as an incumbent.
Harris never discusses her record as Vice President and has never distanced herself from Biden's terrible performance. Each time she is asked a question, she turns the question to Trump's character or Trump's time in office, the latter of which voters fondly remember as vastly superior to the Biden-Harris term.
If the Harris campaign can pull it off, it would retire every political playbook ever written, in which accountability and responsibility no longer matter. It would be the most bizarre thing of all.
ICYMI:
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