It should have been RoboCop's line: "Your move, creep!"
These are pretty close to what will be the final numbers:
Popular Vote: Donald Trump, Republican, 76.9 million; Kamala Harris, Democratic, 74.4 million; Jill Stein, Green Party, 777,000; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Independent, 754,000; Chase Oliver, Libertarian, 640,000; others, 388,000.
Percentages of Popular Vote: Trump, 49.97; Harris, 48.36; Stein, 0.50; Kennedy, 0.49; Oliver, 0.42; others, 0.25.
Electoral Votes: Trump, 312; Harris, 226.
States Won: Trump, 31; Harris, 19 plus the District of Columbia.
Harris is honest, while Trump is the biggest liar in the history of American politics.
Harris is a former prosecutor, while Trump is a convicted felon.
Harris prosecuted sex crimes, while Trump is an adjudicated rapist.
Harris is a classic American story, while Trump sold America out to Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Harris accepted the results of the election within 24 hours of the first polls closing, while Trump not only still has not admitted he lost the 2020 election, but he sent 8,000 native-born, home-grown terrorists to attack the U.S. Capitol Building in an attempt to stop the certification of that election.
Harris represented the Administration that cleaned up the economic and foreign-policy messes left... by Trump.
And yet, slightly less than half the voters -- not a majority, but a plurality -- chose Trump.
They believed his lies about immigrants and crime being a problem -- instead himself and his supporters being criminals -- and got scared.
They believed his lies about the economy, and got scared.
We have heard people say Harris was a bad candidate. Bad? Worse than what? A traitor? A convicted felon? A rapist? A sore loser? All of whom are Trump?
What the hell happened?
Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Kamala Harris for Losing the 2024 Presidential Election
First, a couple of reasons that didn't make the cut: The Best of the Rest.
Joe Biden. Yes, he did a fantastic job as President, especially given the mess he was left -- by Trump. But he insisted upon running for re-election, despite the fact that he would celebrate his 82nd birthday between the election and the Inauguration.
Had he announced at the beginning of Year 3 that he wasn't running for re-election, Harris could have spent Year 3 and Year 4 not just making her case, but building her case. Joe gave her an opportunity, but he denied her the full extent of the opportunity. She ran for President for 107 days. That used to be enough. It is no longer enough.
I don't like blaming Joe. Politically, he really did do an excellent job as President. Personally, he appeals to me on a level more profound than I can express in a few words. And he did put Kamala on the ticket -- once, and, sort-of, twice -- in the first place. But he does bear some responsibility, so I'm making this a "Best of the Rest."
Donald Trump. In addition to everything else, he is an idiot. He is a 14-year-old boy, with a 14-year-old's desires and interests, trapped in the body of a 78-year-old fat man. He sees things on television, and thus acts as though everything has to be a TV show. And, as 14-year-old boys often do, he acts like a "professional wrestler."
But he has one great talent. It's not for governing, obviously. It's not for business, as we have seen. It's for appealing to people with the same mindset as he has: Grown men who act like teenage boys, who see people not like themselves getting further, and presume that this means they're getting left behind. And he promises them that he will be their President, their hero: "I am your retribution." And they ignore the truth of his previous spectacularly failed term in office, and eat his bullshit up.
Robert Mueller. And...
Merrick Garland. Mueller was the Special Prosecutor that was going to save us from Trump. There was a memo, written on September 24, 1973, during Watergate, by Robert G. Dixon, Jr., then the Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel. In that memo, Dixon wrote that an incumbent President could not be indicted for any crime -- not just by Dixon's employer, the U.S. Department of Justice, but by any prosecutor, at any level. But that memo did not, and still does not, have any force of law.
In his report, Mueller said, "If we had confidence that the President did not clearly commit a crime, we would have said so," and, "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."
A Marine Corps hero of the Vietnam War, Mueller could have been a good lawyer, and done his duty by the law. Instead, he chose to be a "good soldier," and he "followed orders," which let Trump get away with his crimes.
If Mueller had indicted Trump when he issued his report on March 22, 2019, Trump could have been convicted during the 2020 campaign. Certainly, in 2021, after leaving office, and allowing for COVID-related delays. And the Republicans, who crowed so much about "the rule of law" during Bill Clinton's Presidency, would have been forced to choose whether or not to nominate a man in prison for President. Instead, Bob Mueller let us down.
Garland was even worse: The Attorney General acted as if he was terrified of appearing partisan, and acted with all the speed of a snail. He could have indicted Trump the day he took office, on March 11, 2021. He had all the evidence he needed, not just with the Mueller Report, but with Trump's own publicly known actions and public statements. He never issued an indictment.
The reason Garland was available as Biden's Attorney General is that he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama in 2016, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to do his constitutional duty, and refused to even hold a hearing on Garland.
In hindsight, maybe it's good that Garland isn't on the Court: He could have been so timid that the conservative Justices might have bullied him into their opinions, turning him into what conservatives call a Justice appointed by a Republican who nevertheless is not conservative enough for them: A "Judas Justice."
Now, the Top 5:
5. Elon Musk. An unrepentant son of apartheid-era South Africa, the apparent richest man in the world, he spent $44 billion for Twitter, which he renamed X, for the purpose of using it to spread propaganda to get Trump elected. In the process, he lost a lot of money, and essentially destroyed the great site that Twitter had been.
But he got the result he wanted: He is now, essentially, the Co-President, even though not one damn person voted for him, not even his biggest fan among Trump voters. He has the power, but not the responsibility. You know, what Trump really wanted. But he had the responsibility, and it crushed him. He said, "No, I don't take responsibility at all."
4. Benedict Joe Hills. Since we are a long way from the golden age of the American labor movement, I will have to explain. Joseph Hillström, a.k.a. Joe Hill,. was a Swedish-born union organizer and a writer of folk songs, operating in the Rocky Mountain States, who was executed in 1915 for a murder he did not commit. The song "Joe Hill" was written about him in 1936 by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson, and it became an anthem of the American labor movement.
Joe Biden was the 1st President ever to walk a picket line, while Trump is a known hirer of strikebreakers and scabs. So the Rust Belt States, especially Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin -- the 3 States that made the difference for Trump in 2016, and went a long way toward making the difference for Biden in 2020 -- should have gone for Harris, as Biden's stand-in.
But a bunch of white men in labor unions didn't go for Harris. They didn't see her as Biden's stand-in. They didn't see her as Biden's 2nd term. They saw her as a black woman who had nothing to do with labor unions. And so they went with the white man who promised them lower prices, forgetting that he already has a record of crashing the economy and killing their jobs, to say nothing of busting unions in his previous public life.
They betrayed America. They betrayed Biden. They betrayed themselves and their families. They weren't Joe Hills, they were Benedict Arnolds. And they will suffer the consequences in 2025, 2026, 2027 and 2028, just as they did in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020.
3. College Kids for Hamas. A bunch of young people saw "the Palestinians" as victims, and couldn't bring themselves to vote for Harris, who supported Israel. On this issue, these voters did see Harris as the stand-in for the Israel-supporting President they stupidly called "Genocide Joe."
They bought the propaganda that the Palestinians were the victims, not the bloodthirsty thug terrorists that they actually are. The Palestinians are ruled by Hamas, who don't give a damn about democracy, or their own people. "Genocide"? Hamas' very reason for existence is the attempted genocide of the Jewish people. The Nazis tried to keep it a secret, but Hamas are completely open about it.
Few things disgust me more than liberals who support underdogs, yet see the Palestinians as the underdogs, when the Palestinians are the ones who start the wars against Israel. Every goddamned time.
So when, on October 7, 2023, Hamas gave Israel an event that, proportionally, was worse than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined, and Israel retaliated, these young voters sided with the equivalent to Imperial Japan and al-Qaeda, against Israel, America's ally, which did what it had every right to do: Attempt to eliminate the enemy permanently.
You want "Palestine" to be free? Hamas don't. They want a dictatorship, with themselves as the dictators, from the river to the sea. Fuck them. And I do not have sympathy for the Palestinians. They gave us Hamas. To Hell with them.
Young people falling hook, line and sinker for Palestinian propaganda, along with the union vote, may have cost Harris Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That combination definitely cost her Michigan, which, proportionally, has the largest ethnically Arab vote of any State, including New York.
(UPDATE: Early in 2025, I learned the expression "Cosplay Commies." A lot of these "kids" claim to be leftists, yet they got fooled into supporting Hamas, a profoundly conservative Islamic group, as are the Ayatollahs of Iran, the Taliban of Afghanistan, ISIS of Iraq, and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda.)
2. Benedict Swifties. What happened to all those women who supposedly registered to vote at Taylor Swift's concerts? They were supposed to make the difference for Harris. Did they simply not show up? Or did they decide that being white was more important than being female, and vote against their own economic interests, and their own reproductive freedom?
This selection of Swift as Person of the Year for 2023,
meaning the person who most affected the news in that calendar year,
now looks very dubious, indeed.
Not to mention, against their own heroine's wishes. In an Instagram post on September 10, 2024, Tay-Tay said:
I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.
As a popular singer from before her time, Don McLean, would have said, "They did not listen. They did not know how. Perhaps they'll listen now."
And the biggest reason of all:
1. The American Media. Hey, when conservatives lose, they blame the media, so why can't liberals?
Let's tell the truth: There is no more "liberal media." The New York Times has not been liberal since 1992, when Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., a.k.a. "Pinch," took over as publisher from his father, Arthur Sr., a.k.a. "Punch." He has let his editorial columnists, especially Maureen Dowd, run roughshod over the Democratic Party. He let Thomas L. Friedman shill for the Iraq War until even he had to admit it was a failure.
These days, in the Times, Maggie Haberman rails against Trump. But if she had told the truth in 2016, about both Trump and Hillary Clinton, Hillary would have won, and Haberman wouldn't have to do it now. Unfortunately, her model for what a New York Times columnist should be turned out to be Dowd, not Anna Quindlen -- who left the Times in 1995.
The Washington Post has not been liberal for about the same time, as Ben Bradlee decided that letting his 3rd wife, Sally Quinn, who despises both Bill and Hillary Clinton, run the paper for him was a good thing.
CBS is no longer liberal: The Tiffany Network showed its true colors when it fired Dan Rather for telling the truth about George W. Bush's military service late in the 2004 Presidential campaign. Even MSNBC has current and former Republicans as half of their hosts.
Conservatives like to call CNN "the Communist News Network." But founder Ted Turner hasn't been involved since 2009 -- and, in 2018, he announced that he had an incapacitating illness that took him out of public life. As of this writing, he is still alive, but hasn't been seen in public in years.
If Turner had still been in charge of CNN in 2015, then, once it looked like Trump was going to run for President, he would have sent journalists to investigate Trump properly, and Trump would have been arrested by the FBI when he got to the bottom of the damn escalator.
Instead, CNN's new corporate overlords gave Trump what amounted to free advertising. They chose him, they chose ratings, they chose money over country. Without CNN, Trump never would have gotten past the New Hampshire Primary.
Trump has, essentially, been running for President for almost 10 years straight. And the media have given him all that free advertising the whole time. In contrast, nothing Harris has ever done is good enough for them. Even though it should have been good enough for everyone: Even without Trump being the most unacceptable candidate for President, ever, Harris should have been good enough, on merit, to be considered a great candidate, no matter who the Republicans had nominated.
But the media treated Trump like a star, and they treated Harris like a party-pooper. Instead of what they should have done, which is tell the truth: Harris is a star, and Trump is a pants-pooper.
When one public figure says one thing, and another public figure says the opposite thing, it is not the media's job to treat both sides as equally worthy of attention. It is the media's job to investigate, and find out which of them has it right, which of them is telling the truth, and then tell the American people that one side is right and the other is wrong -- or, that one is telling the truth, and the other is lying.
The American media is supposed to tell the truth. If they had told the truth about Trump in 2016, we would have been done with him quickly -- politically, if not through the legal system -- and we would now be in the closing days of the Hillary Clinton Administration.
VERDICT: Not Guilty.
