Supporters of former President Donald Trump are excited about next week's debate with Vice President Kamala Harris because they understandably believe she will be exposed as an unqualified lightweight candidate.
But even a Biden-like collapse won't move most Democrats, who won't see it and will ignore it if they do.
That is the world we live in in 2024. Not only is the media lying to the public and trying to hide the truth, voters, especially on the left, are also actively participating in creating their own self-deception.
Thus, Kamala Harris, who was one of the least popular candidates when she ran for president in 2019 (and dropped out before 2020), with approval ratings even lower than President Joe Biden's, suddenly became the beloved leader of her party, bringing the joy back to politics and drawing Democrats off the sidelines and back into the race.
The Democratic Party, not just its leaders but also its voters, have decided that they see in Kamala Harris only what they want to see: that she is a woman, a Black person, an Asian person, and will achieve “firsts” in presidential identity.
But she's also a staunch member of what they call the Biden-Harris Administration, and has been seen as a breath of fresh air despite casting the tie-breaking vote to pass some of the worst legislation in the Senate.
Democrats have decided to see in Kamala Harris what they want to see: an alternative to Trump. Not much more needs to be said about the policies, or the candidate herself.
A recent Boston University poll reported an interesting finding: The “fun” Democratic National Convention highlighted the negative aspects of President Trump, but had almost nothing positive to say about Kamala Harris. They didn't need to.
Reflecting on his own popularity, President Barack Obama once described himself as a “blank slate” onto which people could project whatever they wanted to see.
Kamala Harris is like that, with one difference: Democrats not only want to see what they want to see, they want to get rid of what they don't want to see. Unlike Obama, Harris actually has a long record, and it's not a good one. She was an incompetent local and state prosecutor, an extremist senator, and an unlucky vice president.
All this must be denied.
And in the meantime, new lies must be told about Mr. Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio).
In that respect, the Harris campaign is setting a new low for dishonesty. The “KamalaHQ” Twitter/X account, its official “rapid response” account, is notorious for lying and sharing fabricated stories about Republicans. Most recently, it claimed Vance called school shootings “a fact of life” when he Lament That fact. (Harris later did the same thing.)
KamalaHQ and accounts like it will share snippets of the debate that portray Harris as a clear winner, regardless of how badly she loses or how well Trump does.
While each campaign shares highlights of their candidate and lowlights of their opponent, the Harris campaign has a pattern of simply making up claims. Orwell — “It has no relation to fact, nor even to the relation implied in ordinary lies.”
We Americans now live in two neatly separated media worlds, barely united by common facts, so that our elections are in effect two parallel elections run separately by two political parties and their preferred media, with the winner being the side that can best motivate its own electorate.
The debate is unlikely to deter Democrats. The best thing Trump can do is use it to communicate with his supporters, just like Kamala does with hers.
Joel B. Pollack is executive editor of Breitbart News. Breitbart News Sunday The show airs Sunday nights from 7 to 10 p.m. (4 to 7 p.m. ET) on SiriusXM Patriot. He is the author of “Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” which is available for preorder on Amazon. He also wrote,Trumpian virtue: The lessons and legacy of Donald Trump's presidency” is available on Audible. He is the 2018 recipient of the Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter. Joel Pollack.
