Postcards from America
Summer is just over but it’s still dog-breath hot in Washington. How will it end? At this point, honestly, who knows?
As the diversions of August bleed into the demands of September, America is left pondering its weirdest and most consequential political summer since Richard Milhous Nixon was shoved out of office like a sack of spoiled potatoes in 1974.
On the 2024 US political calendar summer began on 27 June, when President Joe Biden stumbled through a televised debate with Donald Trump like a man talking in his sleep.
It was agonizing to watch. Trump showed out-of-character restraint by not interrupting as Biden bumbled and whispered. Democrats went bananas, big donors ziplocked their wallets and Nancy Pelosi led a behind-the-scenes mercy killing of her old political pal, with a velvet shiv.
Biden exited the race on 21 July and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. She had never been an electrifying political force, but for a blizzard of reasons – including her access to already-collected donations – she suddenly looked like the best choice.
The entire cranky and famously fractious Democratic Party fell in line like children at the ice cream truck.
Harris raised a record $81 million in the 24 hours after Biden announced his departure.
Trump called it a “coup.” He fumed that he didn’t think it was fair that he’d already beaten Biden, and now he had to beat somebody else.
Donald Trump railing about fairness. Next thing you know he’ll be complaining about name-calling.
Speaking of which, Trump tried out a bunch of new juvenile nicknames on Harris, including “Laffin’ Kamala,” a reference to her way-too-enthusiastic laugh. Then he tried “Lyin’ Kamala,” “Crazy Kamala,” and even “Kama-bla,” all the while intentionally mispronouncing her name as Ka-MA-la.
None of the taunts stuck, and Trump spent most of the summer seeming disoriented, like a bully being ignored by the playground.
As if the drama weren’t strange enough, Trump’s new running mate, JD Vance, had a few thoughts to share – about cat ladies.
The media unearthed an interview Vance did in 2021 with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in which he claimed people without children have no “direct stake” in America’s future.
He called them “childless cat ladies.” He lumped Harris, stepmother to two kids, into that category. He has also argued that childless people should pay higher taxes and have fewer voting rights.
Vance’s comments face-planted but he kept doubling down. Trump defended him, but a major campaign subplot became whether Trump would dump him and replace him with, say, Nikki Haley.
Harris stayed largely out of the fray, happy to let Vance do the wet work on the Trump campaign all by himself.
Then she picked as her running mate Tim Walz, a man with even less name recognition across America than Keir Starmer.
But, unlike Starmer, the Minnesota governor and former football coach quickly displayed an almost Zeus-like ability to toss verbal lightning bolts.
Walz, apparently almost by accident, labeled Trump and Vance “weird.” It was so simple, clear and apt that about 50 per cent of Americans basically slapped themselves on the forehead and said, “Of course! Weird! That’s the word I’ve been looking for since 2015!”
Democrats responded with $36 million in campaign contributions in Walz’s first 24 hours on the ticket. Walz joyously kept up the “weird” jabs, which were getting under Trump’s
skin. He played the role of Coach Walz, a Dad so midwestern that he went to the Minnesota state fair and munched a pork chop on a stick, and slurped a vanilla milk shake.
One more Walz common man credential: He is the first Democratic president or vice president nominee since Jimmy Carter in 1980 to not have attended law school.
Nothing about the 2024 race is normal – and sadly, it has even included violence. The nation was stunned in July when a 20-year-old shooter on a Pennsylvania rooftop came terrifyingly close to assassinating Trump. He did kill one person and critically injured two others.
The deadlocked Harris-Trump contest has the highest possible stakes. It pits two dramatically different views of America and its role in the world.
But this serious drama also has a fool in the chorus. Much Ado About Nothing had Dogberry. The 2024 campaign has BearBobby.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., proprietor of a hallowed name in American politics, has been talking for years about batshit crazy conspiracy theories about vaccines and the global elite planning to use a pandemic to impose totalitarian control on the world.
He also said a worm had eaten part of his brain, which was wacky but kind of made sense – unlike the bear story.
Kennedy said he was driving in upstate New York a decade ago when he came across a dead bear cub, which he loaded into his trunk in the hopes of eating it later. But he was late for a dinner in Manhattan, so he dropped the carcass in Central Park, disguising the scene to make it look like the cub had been killed by a cyclist.
The dead bear in Central Park made headlines, but it remained a mystery until a 2024 candidate for President admitted responsibility.
The bear was the gold standard for bizarre RFK Jr. stories, until the whale story washed ashore.
His eldest daughter, known as Kick, gave an interview in 2012 to Town & Country magazine in which she recalled how her dad, who has a fascination with animal skeletons, took a chainsaw to a dead whale that had washed ashore near their home in Hyannis Port, the famed Kennedy summer retreat on Cape Cod. He cut off the head and tied it to the roof of the family minivan for the long drive home to New York.
It’s best in Kick’s own words: “Every time we accelerated on the
highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet.
“We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
Worms and bears and whales, oh my!
Summer is just over but it’s still dog-breath hot in Washington.
The race is a toss-up. It hinges on just seven key swing states, especially Pennsylvania and Georgia. The Washington Post reported that 81 per cent of Trump’s ad reservations between now and the election are in those two states.
The fall sprint is on. Harris and Trump, who have never met, are
scheduled to debate on 10 September on live television.
Will Trump blather incoherently?
Will Harris fall flat?
Will Bobby show up in a unicorn suit?
At this point, honestly, who knows?ut she was there, at his side.