Trump v Harris: Faced with this dismal choice, things are about to get ugly

A recycled renegade vs a progressive experiment. This is not just a contest over policies. It is a cultural war over America’s future.

The US presidential contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris looms as an acrimonious, deeply negative and divisive contest for America. Original artwork by Dani Banco

Excitement, drama and unprecedented events should guarantee a better politics. But as the fog lifts, revealing the cold light of day, the US presidential contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris looms as an acrimonious, deeply negative and divisive contest for America.

Even worse, it is extremely unlikely the election will deliver an effective president for the times – a leader able to lift the US on to a higher plateau. This is a contest between candidates occupying opposing political and cultural fortresses convinced of their righteousness and sure their opponent will bring havoc to the country.

It is a contest between a dangerously recycled Donald Trump and an untested progressive, Kamala Harris, elevated only because of Joe Biden’s weakness. Will the contest produce a stronger America? That is possible but most unlikely. Will it deliver a more unified America? Only the foolhardy would agree.

True believers aside, this choice is neither appealing nor inspiring. Trump and Harris are complete opposites in every sense. They are likely to wage a bitter, mutually demonising battle over polarised visions for America’s future.

The fear is that the next 100 days will seed even more deep-seated division.

If Harris wins, will Trump repeat his 2020 refusal to accept the result and stage a rebellion?

There are few grounds for thinking that Trump’s populism or Harris’s progressivism is the path to better governance. This is not just a contest over personalities and policies. It is a cultural war over America’s future. Despite the seismic shake-ups and dramas of recent weeks the hard truth is that a flawed US political system is on display.

If translated to Australia’s system of Westminster parliamentary politics, neither Trump nor Harris would be leading their parties in the equivalent of a federal election. They wouldn’t cut it. The feature of the contest is the weakness of the political centre.

The current excitement is tinged with danger. Trump has taken the Republican Party to an emotional high where it expects victory. Harris’s elevation has given the Democratic Party a hope that it might be able to pull an unexpected victory from the jaws of defeat.

The biggest risk is what happens after the election. If Harris wins, will Trump repeat his 2020 refusal to accept the result and stage a rebellion? And if Trump wins, what prospects that US progressives will accept his legitimacy, even though their direct retaliation may be muted?

This contest will test American democracy. The polarisation is intense – between a renegade Trump, reckless in his exploitation of grievance and demanding a second chance to “make America great again”, and a black women from California, tied to the Biden administration as Vice-President, far more personally appealing than Biden yet possibly to the left of a President who failed because he was too left.

This is not to deny the sense of relief, the uplifting moments and progress made since the Trump-Biden debate. Biden’s resignation as a candidate was absolutely essential – he was doomed politically and should have acted months earlier; fortunately Trump survived the attempt on his life; and Harris has injected much needed hope, finance and energy into the Democratic campaign.

Indeed, the Democrats were almost in party mode, driven by relief, optimism and steel. They have a candidate who can fight – unlike Biden – and Harris, as a black woman, can change the personality dynamics and put Trump under pressure over how he responds to her.

Harris is an experiment. She is risky but offers fresh opportunities. She benefits from the phenomenon of the new. Suddenly Trump is the old guy, prone to rambling. Harris can put up her life story in presidential lights. She will get a honeymoon, a bonus she desperately needs. Harris received $US81m ($123m) in her first 24 hours. The idea she might beat Trump will ignite the anti-Trump movement across the country.

Yet her inexperience means Harris faces a herculean task. Get ready for a highly destructive negative campaign from both sides – they constitute each other’s greatest hatreds. For Trump’s MAGA movement, Harris is “wokism” personified; for progressives, Trump is a direct threat to US democracy.

But if Harris gets an initial lead in the polls, how angry will Trump get? How frustrated is Trump that Biden is gone, his certain victory has disappeared, and that he must start again and defeat a different candidate? Harris sent an immediate message: she will confront and nail Trump. Drawing on her background as a prosecutor, Harris brands the contest as a prosecutor against a felon.

Recycled renegade: Donald Trump.

Will Trump attack Harris over her race and gender? Time will tell, but surely yes. He can’t help himself. In his first rally since Harris in effect secured the nomination, Trump was feeling out the territory. “There’s never been a lunatic like this in the White House,” he declared, and denounced Harris as a “far-left radical extremist” and “the most liberal elected politician in American history”. He radiates contempt for her. This is just the start of the abuse.

Harris must do three things – unify the party, take the fight to Trump to provoke the worst side of his character, and open a new story about what she stands for as a president. Yet each challenge requires a different response. She lacks combat experience in presidential campaign politics; her ability to campaign without major blunders must be doubted.

In praising Biden, Harris said he had “surpassed the legacy of most presidents who served two terms”. Harris is locked into the Biden era, yet she cannot allow her presidential bid to become a referendum on the Biden era. She needs to project a persona in own her right, yet time is short. Pitching to African-Americans and the youth vote won’t suffice. She must win votes of moderates and independents across the swing states.

Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, the appealing JD Vance, will function as a lethal attack dog. He knows the message: “Joe Biden has been the worst President in my lifetime and Kamala Harris has been right there with him every step of the way,” Vance has tweeted. “Over the last four years she co-signed Biden’s open border and green scam policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries. She lied for nearly four years about Biden’s mental capacity.”

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has already begun attacking Kamala Harris and her record.

A critical question is whether Trump is capable of running a disciplined campaign. If so, he probably wins. Yet his off-message diatribes at rallies suggest a danger point. Trump’s campaign, reinforced by Vance, is on the cost-of-living hardship, inflation, the massive failure at the southern border – for which Harris has a personal culpability – his economic protectionist appeal to industrial workers and his cultural assault on Biden-Harris “wokism” and every aspect of progressive values.

Vance, again, pulls this together. He holds Democratic elites to blame over law and order failures, addictive drugs, the spread of diversity, equity and inclusion codes, family breakdowns, disastrous foreign wars, exporting jobs and industries to China, shutting down fossil fuels and the rent crisis.

This election penetrates to two critical issues. It will test whether the Trump revolution can pull enough working-class votes to transform the Republican Party and deliver Trump his victory.

On the other hand, the Harris campaign will test the influence of American progressivism and whether the Democrats can throttle Trump in his final bid for power.

Harris moved with assurance this week. She was quick to mobilise support, confirm her nomination and terminate the pressure for a political beauty contest. She signalled immediately she was prepared to confront Trump. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” she told a Wisconsin rally. Harris said in her previous roles as a prosecutor she dealt with “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain” – linking Trump to such behaviour.

She is not afraid to tag Trump as a predator.

As a woman and a progressive, Harris is getting ready to target Trump. Abortion is high on her agenda. Since the conservative-dominated Supreme Court overthrew Roe v Wade, the Trump camp has been vulnerable, with Trump saying it is an issue for the states. “We trust women to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris said. Expect high dramatics when Harris confronts Trump over abortion in their televised debates.

Harris, having backed the Biden administration’s protectionist policies, is forced to expose Trump as a hypocrite – given that Trump’s ‘working man’ populism is tied to financial power.

This election is the moment of truth for the Republicans. The party has completely succumbed to Trump, a result that seemed improbable after he incited the January 6 invasion of the Capitol by the mob and peddled lies that the election had been stolen.

Vance is significant because he represents, more than Trump, the pitch to reinvent the Republicans and draw votes from the working class. In his nomination speech at the convention, Vance said: “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man. We’re done importing foreign labour. We’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages. We’re done buying energy from countries that hate us. We’re done sacrificing supply chains to unlimited global trade and we’re going to stamp more and more products with that beautiful label: Made in the USA. We’re going to build factories again, put people to work making real products for American families made with the hands of American workers.”

Here is the new high tide of protectionist romanticism and the allure of increased tariffs. Such economic fantasies periodically erupt down the decades but rarely with the plausible populism of Vance. He may become an effective agent of persuasion.

Harris, having backed the Biden administration’s protectionist policies, is forced to expose Trump as a hypocrite – given that Trump’s “working man” populism is tied to financial power.

“He (Trump) intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and make working families foot the bill,” Harris said. But does she have the authority to make such criticism stick?

The real lost cause in this election is credible economics – the need to support the Federal Reserve beating inflation, an administration that tackles the unsustainable US budget deficit and engages in genuine productivity-enhancing policies.

Six month ago the American Enterprise Institute published a devastating assault on Trump’s fraudulent economics by Michael R. Strain, saying: “Donald Trump’s ascendancy has inflicted many changes on the right, including substantially altering its posture on economic issues. Where this blend of economic nationalism and conservatism populism has been tried, it has been found wanting – at least if you take the goal of working-class populism to be better opportunities and outcomes for the working class. And there is every reason to believe that more of this approach in the future will lead to the same disappointing outcomes.

Her early messages suggest Harris will strive for maximum philosophical and cultural differences with Trump.

“In a free society, businesses, make long-run decisions based on real-world factors, not on the president thumping his chest and howling ‘America First’.”

What vision does Harris have for America? Nobody knows. That’s largely a blank page. It’s a bizarre situation. “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” she said. But how? She needs to sketch out her economic and foreign policies.

Her early messages suggest Harris will strive for maximum philosophical and cultural differences with Trump. Harris says she wants an America based on “freedom, compassion and rule of law” as opposed to, she says, Trump’s “chaos, fear and hate”. This is a big political position – Harris will need to become a figure of authority and persuasion to carry it off.

That means repositioning to the political centre. It means showing a grasp of economics and foreign policy that so far has eluded her. It means introducing herself to millions of Americans who know little about her and displaying a touch of charisma necessary to combat Trump.

Harris will be effective running an anti-Trump campaign. But that won’t deliver victory. The Democrats ditched Biden because he was incapable of projecting himself as a credible leader. That task now falls to Harris. Somehow, she has to inspire the progressive loyalists, encourage wavers to vote and sway independents to her side. The task is beyond daunting – unless Trump implodes.