Kamala Harris may be worse than both Joe Biden and Donald Trump

As Vice-President she’s been effectively powerless and mostly off stage, but her worrying record shows she’s never really moved out of the undergraduate activist phase.

Kamala Harris supported the bail fund for those arrested in the extremely violent defund the police and Black Lives Matter demonstrations. She also urged these demonstrations on, despite their at times extravagant violence.

Could Kamala Harris be a worse president even than Joe Biden has been? More importantly, could she be worse than Donald Trump? The answer to both questions, based on her political record, is, sadly, yes. From Australia’s point of view, as well as from America’s, Harris could be a very poor president, at best a poor man’s Jimmy Carter, at worst, well, who knows …

Australians don’t vote in US elections but the difference for Australia between a Harris or a Trump presidency could be very great. Much of the analysis of the American political situation is absurd because it assumes that only Trump is challenging traditional American political and ethical norms.

Harris, in her own way, is the third leg of the triad of Biden-Trump-Harris institutional dereliction and norm-breaking.

There’s a good case for thinking that Harris may turn out to be the worst of the three. She just hasn’t had much attention so far because as Vice-President she’s been effectively powerless and mostly off stage.

However, Harris is a programmatic California uber-liberal who speaks with the unconscious incoherence of someone who, on the biggest issues, has never really moved out of the phase of undergraduate activist hyperventilating mixed with sporadic reading of The New York Times.

For example, Harris supported the bail fund for those arrested in the extremely violent defund the police and Black Lives Matter demonstrations. She also urged these demonstrations on, despite their at times extravagant violence, and said they would not stop and should not stop.

In substance, though not in terms of media attention, this is at least as outrageous as anything Trump has said about the foolish, disgraceful riot at Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.

Harris, too, explicitly favoured the strategy of repeated legal prosecutions of Trump. These prosecutions have been carried out exclusively by elected Democrat prosecutors or a Democrat-appointed special prosecutor and are a monstrous abuse of process. They are in the process now of slowly collapsing under the weight of their own unreasonableness.

That Trump leads in the polls, despite these prosecutions, demonstrates not only that the prosecutions have failed politically but that they have also done a great deal to undermine the standing, independence and integrity of the American legal system.

Very little is really known about Harris’s foreign policy, mainly because she’s never really had a foreign policy beyond left-liberal cliches. As Vice-President she has, of course, followed along with Biden. Biden’s foreign policies have often been weak, confused and meandering, and of little effect. Occasionally they’ve been disastrous, as in the manner of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Occasionally they’ve been about two-thirds right, as with the support for Ukraine. However, that support has been too limited, not so much in volume but in the type of weaponry supplied to the Ukrainians.

It has also been clear at every point that Biden is scared of escalation. Prudence is certainly warranted in dealing with a nuclear adversary like Russia, but a fear of escalation under any circumstances gives enormous power and leverage to your opponent. You cannot deter an adversary if they’re sure you’ll never escalate. Trump’s unpredictability, though also destabilising in its way, reinforced American deterrence.

On China, and Asia generally, Biden has been a bit better, largely because of the influence of US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell. On Israel, Biden has given strong but deeply qualified, slowly eroding support. On military spending Biden has been very weak, generally proposing each year a military budget a bit less in real terms than the year before, and doing very little to increase the US defence industrial capacity.

On all these matters there’s good reason to believe Harris would be worse than Biden and, with the exception of Ukraine, much worse than Trump.

For a start, Harris, on the basis of her record and stated priorities, would not support a bigger US defence budget. That’s a very bad development for Australia.

Second, as the Republicans have rightly argued, Harris really is a standard-issue San Francisco
left-liberal. All politicians have individual roads to success but Harris’s career has not been studded with exceptional achievement.

She failed the bar exam the first time she took it. In California, which is virtually a one-party state, she achieved high position much more through patronage and appointment than through outstanding electoral or professional performance.

In her first statewide race, in 2011 for California attorney-general, she squeaked out the narrowest of victories against the Republican opponent, whereas other Democrats in statewide contests won by miles.

Harris has proposed spectacular, almost limitless, rolling increases in government spending for healthcare, childcare and, the greatest middle-class welfare of all, student debt relief, as well as other countless areas of government expense.

Of course, most contemporary politics is performative and politicians say these things without really expecting that they will deliver on them.

But Harris, so far at least, is running mostly to her base, just as Trump is running mostly to his base. That must mean, despite the trillion-dollar budget deficit and national debt in multiples of trillions, there is almost certain to be a significant social spending increase under a Harris presidency. That has two results. One, it’s inflationary. And two, it’s impossible to imagine greater US defence spending under these circumstances. Both of those results are very bad for Australia.

Harris supports a whole swag of economy-killing measures, such as fracking bans, restrictions on fuel exploration and the most extravagant green commitments.

And in so far as Harris ever has expressed a foreign policy idea of her own, it has been well to the left even of Biden. Thus, with astonishing bad manners and showing contempt for a critical US ally, she decided not to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to congress, even though, as Vice-President, she is president of the Senate.

Harris is effectively anti-Israel. It was widely leaked that National Security Council staff had to tone down public comments she planned to make critical of Israel. This leak seems a typical Harris dodge, signalling to her base her hostility to Israel without actually contradicting Biden policy.

It was remarkable in Biden’s dismal farewell address to the nation this week how little he spoke of Harris. He chose Harris partly because he thought she could never be an alternative to him and made sure she had a low profile as Vice-President. His address was nonsensical as he claimed he had a great record as President, would have beaten Trump, was competent for a second term but was standing down as candidate for the presidency to ensure party unity. Which begs the question: If Biden was so great why was the prospect of his candidacy producing such disunity among Democrats?

With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky during his congressional address in 2022.

Biden also said Americans must stop seeing people they disagreed with as enemies, and then went on to say Trump and the Republicans would, if elected this cycle, destroy democracy; that is, though he didn’t use this word, that Republicans are fascists.

Of course Biden was wildly praised by the liberal media that the week before had been condemning his manifest mental decline. Certainly Biden made no case for Harris’s achievements as Veep. This is partly because she has no achievements to boast of. Her one big assignment was to fix the southern border. She was a disastrous failure on this and then ran away from the issue.

Harris also supports extremely divisive social policy, such as paying reparations to descendants of slaves. Nothing would more promote white identity politics and really nasty race hostilities than the idea of struggling West Virginia hillbillies having to pay higher taxes to fund reparations payments for Oprah Winfrey et al.

Harris has travelled a good deal internationally as Veep, not least to Asia, and has got to know a lot of international leaders. That’s quite useful. The one real prospect of getting some good policy out of her lies in the paradox that as a reflexive lefty she may come under pressure from the centre and the right of her party, just as Biden, as a natural centrist, came under pressure, which he didn’t resist at all, from the left. But that’s a very slender reed of hope.

A minimal example of Harris tacking slightly to the centre was her condemnation of violent pro-Hamas demonstrations in Washington that featured the burning of US flags and, after a meeting with Netanyahu, still demanding an instant ceasefire but also restating the bare minimum and obvious point that Israel has the right to defend itself.

The likelihood is that a Harris presidency would be bad for America and very bad for Australia.

The other minimal reassurance is that, like Biden, she would let much of the US system run on autopilot, and in its way the US system is competent.

The likelihood is that a Harris presidency would be bad for America and very bad for Australia. What about a Trump presidency? If, as still seems likely, Trump does become president, the US is likely to be stronger but less predictable than it would be under Harris. It is devoutly to be wished that whichever of them wins does so with a sufficient popular and electoral college majority that the legitimacy of the result is clear. Americans will still prosecute great political conflict post-election, but at least every reasonable person would have to accept the result.

Australian policymakers will need to work hard and with great discipline to prosecute Australia’s national interests in the event of a Trump presidency. The US is the most important nation for Australia. Ever since the Spanish-American War of 1898 led to the US acquiring The Philippines and becoming a great Pacific, Asian and naval power, our security has been underwritten by the US, especially the US Navy.

We have decided, and the Albanese government is fully living down to its predecessors here, never to provide for our own defence. We’ve never been more dependent on the US for security than now. Trump needn’t mean anything disastrous for Australia, so long as we manage it well.

The key to managing a Trump presidency is for federal ministers to maintain complete discipline in how they speak about Trump.

I’ve been in America for several weeks, initially to attend the Australian American Leadership Dialogue. Australia has a high standing in the US, probably higher than we deserve. Kevin Rudd is a tireless ambassador and our concerns are prosecuted effectively with congress.

Trump will be challenging for Labor because he’s bound to say things that upset Labor’s activist class. The key to managing a Trump presidency is for federal ministers to maintain complete discipline in how they speak about Trump. Labor has been all over the shop on Israel and Gaza. It will need vastly more discipline to serve Australia well during a Trump presidency.

Predicting Trump’s behaviour is inherently difficult because of his mercurial personality. Beyond that, there will be at least four separate foreign policy tendencies within a Trump administration, all vying for influence. It’s unlikely there will be a stable balance among them because Trump himself is so changeable. One important group will be those loyal Trumpists who are foreign policy hawks but still fully committed to American’s alli­ances and global role. These include former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien, and Florida senator Marco Rubio. These folks are all the way with Trump but they believe the core of Trump’s vision is compatible with US global leadership and alliances.

Then there are the America Firsters, with much less commitment to America’s global role. Chief among these are former Trump official Elbridge Colby and the new superstar vice-presidential candidate JD Vance. They don’t want to give US aid to Ukraine, they don’t much like Europe and they don’t care for NATO. Dismayingly, Vance has said he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine, a statement of immaturity, though there are signs he’s moving past such foolishness.

Like the first group, America Firsters are hostile to China. Sometimes they argue the US should diminish its commitment to Europe in order to focus more resources on Asia and be more ready militarily to deal with any challenge China throws up.

However, it’s by no means clear that they would support US military action even to defend Taiwan. Vance, though impressive and formidable, has been a shapeshifter on these issues. Whether he has been fully converted to this strain of Trumpism, or partly thought that it would greatly assist his advancement, is unclear.

Trump supporters during a campaign rally at the Bojangles Coliseum on July 24 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A third group, not to be discounted, is the conventional Republicans. Tennessee senator Bill Hagerty, a former US ambassador to Japan, could well be secretary of state. The professional Republicans have certainly signed up to Trump but they remain mainstream Republican professionals and they will bring that sensibility with them.

The fourth group is the Make America Great Again crazies, a la congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. These people vary but are the types who keep an open mind on whether the Lizard Illuminati are active, on whether the Apollo 11 moon landing was a hoax, on whether UFOs have landed and communicated with the CIA. Disturbingly, Trump never den­ounces these nuts. Reassuringly, he is moving away from them.

With Vance as vice-president, as opposed to Trump’s previous veep, Mike Pence, the sound figures with the deepest sense of alliance responsibility will not have an anchor in the White House. Pence was a critically important interlocutor for allies.

For all Vance’s brilliance, it’s partly the fact he’s so junior that Trump finds attractive. Narcissistic leaders seldom appoint big characters around them.

The other unpredictable feature is Trump himself. Because he sees everything as a negotiation, and because he’ so completely self-centric, Trump will at any moment change his mind, reverse policy, promote or demote someone on a whim. Trump is much wiser to the ways of government than he was in 2016, but he’s still Trump. Trump foreign policy will likely have a clear enough direction but there will be a lot of uncertainty, if not chaos.

Other Trump factors are widely underestimated. For all his drama, Trump is ruthlessly pragmatic. He will want at some level a successful presidency. He’ll readily reverse any policy he thinks is starting to hurt him.

And finally, Trump, although remarkably dynamic and consequential, is also quite lazy, especially about policy detail. A smart staffer can get a huge amount of stuff done by being the guy who looks after the bumf, or keeps things away from Trump’s sporadic attention span.

The Trump-Harris contest is an improvement on the Trump-Biden match-up. Neither is ideal for Australia. A strong, unpredictable and potentially chaotic Trump versus a woke, ideological, leftward-travelling dilettante in Harris. It will be deeply challenging for us to make the best of either of them.