2024 Presidential Race and Citizen Action Items
We’re betting you weren’t expecting this odd and odious outcome for U.S. president a year ago. It’s 2024 now, and boy does it feel like a snippet out of Orwell. In 2023, Trump was besieged by debts and losing court cases. Some of the malfeasance just boggles the mind: Inciting a failed coup d’etat on January 6, 2021. Campaign fraud. Sexual assault: convicted. Caught on tape bragging about his sexual conquests while married. A sophomoric attempt to subvert the election with fake electors. Emoluments. Attempting to extort Ukraine in exchange for U.S. military aid. We’re also betting you’ve forgotten about that last one. Heck, we’re betting you’ve forgotten about the last three. Can you believe that? Such behavior would’ve sunk any prior president for life.
Clearly the office of the U.S. president has changed permanently. U.S. voters were perceived as moral and judgmental. Nay to that. Instead, they’re selfish, superficial, emotional, and spectacularly inattentive. We’ve discovered that, with the proper slavish following and a lack of clear moral opposition, the voters will ignore a gargantuan slew of damning facts.
Let’s put this clearly. Trump personified the trope that there truly isn’t such a thing as bad publicity, especially in this news-lite era. Bad press beats boring press, and making a splash with regularity, no matter how inelegantly, means you dominate the conversation and suffocate the opposition.
How could Kamala have cut herself a larger slice of the newsmaking pie? For us, the answer lies not in following the Trump path of lies, fear, and hatred, but in carving a fresh trail that makes politics hilarious. The Democrats’ nicey-nicey check-our-facts tepid approach doesn’t work in the clickbait era. You have to grab the headlines by the throat and shake them until the clicks fall out in your favor. Even Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” ethical line in the sand incorporates an inherent misunderstanding of the dynamic. It’s not good vs. bad; it’s getting heard vs. getting silenced. Nor is it necessary to fight alarmism with alarmism.
What specifically do we think the Democrats need to break the hypnotic spell? Perhaps a snarky tour of Donald Trump’s greatest failures, with Kamala interviewing former business partners, contractors, and Cabinet members? Fireside chats dissecting video of Trump’s ridiculous statements and lies? Three-minute Economics 101 Youtube videos gently explaining to Trump how tariffs work? A ten-minute weekly video bit that compares Red and Blue policies, cohosted by a late-night talk show host and a rotating cast of celebrities and broadcast both online and on TV? That would’ve all been must-see TV. “Concept of a plan” – Trump’s hilariously pathetic debate excuse for still not delivering a Trumpcare medical plan after nine years of promises to do so – should’ve been leveraged to the hilt but wasn’t. What about Kamala talking to people whose lives have been changed by Obamacare? That’s not hard.
Hatred and bile is not in the Democratic playbook, and we support that, but knowing, withering humor is never out of style. The Dems need to dominate the storylines and shame Republicans with their own tactics and ethics.
Watching U.S. politics in future may be a bracing and ugly experience. But it doesn’t all have to be bigotry and fearmongering.
This Presidential Race Was Not Business As Usual
To be fair, Kamala Harris was kneecapped by Biden’s horrific timing. You can’t stage an effective national election campaign and set up a platform in the span of a few months. But we don’t think Biden was the problem. The Democrats’ inability to counter Trump attacks was deeply felt. They were on the defense on a lot of legitimate major issues like immigration and the economy. They had excellent counters to these both – Trump’s record on both is terrible, and Biden guided us through the global economic chaos of the pandemic – but many voters thought they had none. Trump’s bile made headlines while Harris’ pleasantries did not. Against one of the most vulnerable candidates in history, she was additionally crippled because Dems were loath to go on the offensive and seem “too shrewish” or “too Hillary-ish,” a constraint a male presidential candidate wouldn’t have had to entertain.
A unifying thread in this debacle is the smell of business-as-usual. Democrats ran the same tired playbook, following the lead of their experts and campaign managers. They failed to see the bigger problems: Trump was dominating the storylines, they weren’t attacking Trump’s varied and glaring weak spots, and they weren’t resoundingly countering Trump’s ill-founded attacks on key issues. In the followup, Sen. Bernie Sanders lamented, “Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing?” Indeed.
Speaking of common-man suffering: we also feel Biden failed to shame big U.S. corporations into lowering prices and stopping the profiteering. Inflation numbers showed a strong recovery, but prices remained high as companies padded their pockets. As Bernie could tell you, Biden and Harris would’ve won real bankable political loyalty if they’d been willing to step on some wingtip-shod toes, but that opportunity was missed.
We are concerned that, with all the rhetorical tools to defend democracy in their hands, the Dems let the presidency slip away at this pivotal moment. The Republicans have figured out a way to buy the rich and fearmonger the poor at the same time. Shiny Happy People and a campaign based on joy are not going to beat that. The Dems had no counter, even though the right was running one of the weakest candidates in history, a manipulatable man who’s a liar, a bigot, and a loose cannon.
We’re Betting No One Else Is Pointing This Finger
There’s a plethora of finger-pointing right now, from Biden to young males to pollsters. Fine. We think the pundits are missing the bigger picture: journalists and religious leaders.
These two professional groups, especially the churches, have been notably absent in communicating how outre and offensive a Trump presidency will be. They should’ve clearly guided the voters into seeing that this candidacy is not moral or acceptable. Because it’s not. But they were too busy chasing money and clicks to seize the moment.
Newspapers and other media outlets have been running scared in the new media economy as their industry transitions from subscriptions to earning ad money off clicks. Now popular content makes money; factual, difficult content does not. COVID stories did great before the vaccine came out; now updates are hard to find because nobody wants to read about it anymore. Heck, nobody wants to read anymore. They had a massive opportunity here to draw a line in the sand and prove their value by systematically raising the red flag and protesting vehemently against this offense against democracy.
In the old media economy, classic broadcasters like Walter Kronkite wouldn’t have simply narrated as Trump threatened and bloviated his way through the halls of Congress. This is not what you do when you see your rights and those of your friends and family being permanently harmed by a traitor who has demonstrably attacked the nation. But on election night, we watched broadcasters amiably and spinelessly commenting and narrating as they saw damage being done. Let’s put it this way: you don’t entertain at the wedding as your mother remarries the ex-husband who routinely used to beat you bloody.
We’re thinking most journalists would be happy to say to you directly that the 2024 Trump presidency is a joke and that Trump should be in jail, not in the White House. Did they shout it in their writing in a systemic way? Did they make provisions so Harris’ quieter, saner voice got equal time with Trump’s? Mostly, they didn’t. In a world where the country is split down the middle, they’d be giving up half those valuable clicks. But in a world where the country can’t be bothered to read up on their presidential candidates, we rely on journalists to tell us what’s broken.
And churches, ohhh, we reserve special loathing for many churches. We know, separation of church and state (which Republicans do not respect, and is a governmental concept, not a religious one). We know, it’s traditionally uncouth for pastors to speak on politics. What’s also traditional, however, is for churches to lead on ethics, freedom, and the moral continuity of the nation, to point out hypocrisy and untruth, even if it might cause them to lose some in the donation box. In exceptional times, we expect our religious leaders to take exceptional action. See next section.
This U.S. President Is A Joke
Make no mistake: no matter what your political loyalty, Trump is a horrible parody of a national leader. In 2017, he tried to dismantle the country from the White House, appointing saboteurs to lead crucial governmental agencies like the Department of Education, the Post Office, and the National Security Council (none of his appointees to the NSC had any NSC experience). In 2021, he clearly tried to destroy this government by force, inciting a mob to attack the Capital, which had not been attacked by any group since the British during the American Revolution. And now our mewling, cowed political leadership, in exchange for his mercurial support, have aided and abetted him into the top seat again so he can finish the devastation… and most glaringly, so he can protect his own oversized posterior from lawsuits (convicted of 34 felonies thus far, and legally unable to vote in New York state) and debtors. In our opinion, just like Trump himself, a Trump loyalty is simply traitorous and fascistic.
It’s also tacky. Have we ever seen a president so eager to hawk merchandise? He’s pitched Bibles, watches, his own failed university, beans, and a mind-blowing set of crypto EFTs featuring him as a superhero, cowboy, and God knows what else. We’re still trying to gauge how much he owes to Putin, financially and otherwise.
We also think it’s important to emphasize how much contempt Trump has shown for the bedrock of democracy, free and fair elections. Never in American history has anyone done so much documented damage to elections, culminating in a laughable attempt to send in fake electors to erase the 2020 election results. Will every future losing Republican candidate run a post-election “stop the steal” effort? Will every election simply be preamble to months of legal battles and a Supreme Court ruling? Is our electoral college now composed exclusively of nine senior citizens with possibly compromised loyalty to the republic? We dread to find out.
Lastly, it’s only two days after the election, and already we’re getting clear signs that the extremist Project 2025 document, aimed at gutting the existing government staff that is hired, not appointed, and contains the bulk of the government’s institutional knowledge, is fully in play. Gird up, folks. It’s going to be a long four years.
In short, everyone’s for sale, journalists, pastors, newspapers, even the SCOTUS and clearly the POTUS. So who’s minding the story, funny man?
What Are We Betting On Next?
In the deafening vacuum created by the silence of journalists and church leaders, we’ve found some surprising patriots, whom we think all good citizens should take concrete steps to help and support.
Those surprising patriots are at the vanguard of both old and new media. We must celebrate and amplify people like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart, and John Oliver, who as humble entertainers have been leading the fight when our guardians have failed. And we must do the same for podcasts like This American Life and On the Media. Why? Not because we get a cut (we don’t). Because if you like something and you don’t support it, it dies. Even if it’s free. Especially if it’s free. That’s the way the world works.
Here’s a simple painless cost-free citizen suggestion: go to YouTube right now and subscribe to the LastWeekTonight, Late Night with Stephen Colbert, Daily Show, and Jimmy Kimmel Live channels. Like a few videos. They’re funny and they might soothe your soul a little. These talented folks do an amazing job of making often tedious topics hilarious and crystal-clear.
Side note: it’s ironic that these comedians from late night are entertainers just as much as Fox News is staffed by entertainers and driven by viewership. More and more, as the gatekeepers have fallen and the hoi polloi choose their information, opt-in entertainment is driving our news. The key difference, of course, is that we’re getting sold what we want and not what we need to know. And we think one of the key distinctions between news and entertainment is that we rely on our providers to tell us what we need to know. The other, less serious observation here is that, while conservatives are opting to consume content infused with fear and hatred, liberals choose facts steeped in ironic laughter. We find that refreshing and a stark contrast. We also think these comedians are showing the Democrats how they need to update their stale methods.
And of course, we celebrate and support the principled journalists and religious leaders who’ve raised their voices against American fascism. Patronize them, donate to them, encourage them.
In short, the Republicans have evolved to appeal to the working class by leveraging racism, fear, and hate. Democrats are not getting the job done with the same old platitudes and fence-sitting. We think snarky humor and facts will never go out of style, but we also think the Democrats need to learn from The Daily Show and others how to make headlines without hatred.
So the next time you’re thinking of buying a good read, watch, or wear, consider instead subscribing to or buying something from one of these new guardians of your personal and political freedoms or some journalist, writer, or pastor who’s proven their worth. We’re betting you’re not subscribing to a newspaper anymore, so you’ve got the spare change. Why not?
