One reason why the outcome of the current presidential election campaign is so hard for the political and polling experts to predict with any certainty is that the choice between Republican former President Donald Trump and Democrat Vice President Kamals Harris is being driven as much by a culture clash between traditional working-class voters and the more highly educated professionals and liberal elites as it is by the candidates’ positions on the top issues in the campaign, and voter evaluations of each candidate’s fitness to govern the country.
Since the 2024 presidential election campaign began, the polls have indicated that the top concerns for voters are inflation and the economy’s health, immigration and border security, and taxes and government spending. These are followed by issues related to differences over core beliefs between members of the working class and the liberal elites, including the moral values guiding the goals and priorities of government, and the very nature of American democracy.
KEY ISSUE: INFLATION AND THE ECONOMY
Ever since the Covid pandemic forced a shutdown that disrupted much of the American economy, followed by a flood of government relief spending which triggered a spike in inflation, the high cost of the essentials of daily living, ranging from food to energy to housing, has consistently been the top concern for American voters. It is closely followed by voter fears that the sharp increase in interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve to bring the rate of inflation back down to acceptable levels could force the American economy into a recession.
When President Joe Biden was the Democrat candidate during the earlier part of this presidential campaign, he denied that his policies were responsible for the ruinous spike in inflation. He also tried to claim political credit for the rapid recovery of the American economy as reflected by a growing GDP and robust employment growth. But polls showed that the president’s claim that his Bidenomics policies were a success was rejected by most voters. Every time they went shopping for food in the supermarket, filled up their car with gas at the pump, or sat down to pay their monthly bills for housing and utilities, they were reminded that they were losing ground because the increases in their paychecks could not keep pace with the roughly 20% increase in their cost of living since President Biden and Vice President Harris took office in January 2021.
As a result, President Biden’s job approval numbers remained roughly constant at about 40%, which historically is a dangerously low level for an incumbent president seeking a second term in office. It enabled Trump to maintain a relatively small but persistent lead over Biden in national opinion polls, and more crucially in the polls of most of the battleground states which were the key to Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election.
DEMOCRAT ATTEMPTS TO DEMONIZE
The Biden campaign, with the support of liberal mainstream news outlets and politically motivated Democrat prosecutors, tried to use bogus criminal complaints to demonize Trump as a convicted felon. At the same time, Biden and elected Democrats kept accusing Trump of being a threat to American democracy because of his insistence that voter fraud cheated him out of a victory in the 2020 election, and because hundreds of his followers who shared that opinion rioted at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, in protest against the Congressional certification of Biden’s victory that day.
Nevertheless, Trump’s small lead in the national and battleground polls remained constant or grew slowly, as Trump and his legal defense team were able to get the major criminal charges against him thrown out on legal grounds, and more voters began to recall with nostalgia the peace and economic prosperity they enjoyed during the first three years of Trump’s presidency before the start of the Covid pandemic.
In an effort to neutralize Trump’s growing momentum, Biden and his campaign made the fateful decision to challenge Trump to two televised debates. They failed to realize that the first of the debates, held on June 27, would expose before a national television audience the shocking decline in President Biden’s cognitive abilities which the White House, Democrat party leaders, and the mainstream media had been conspiring to hide from the American people.
HARRIS REPLACES BIDEN IN A BLOODLESS COUP
The impact was immediate. Post-debate polls showed a collapse in voter support for Biden, leading to widespread predictions of a Trump-led Republican landslide victory in the November 5 election, with the GOP taking back control over both houses of Congress and the White House.
To avoid that political catastrophe, senior Democrat party figures led by former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered a bloodless coup that forced Biden to announce on July 21 that he was dropping his bid for the presidency in favor of his vice president Kamala Harris, who until then had been widely considered to be an embarrassment to the Biden administration because of her incompetence.
While Democrats were widely relieved that Biden would be off the ballot, preventing a looming catastrophe on Election Day, they were left with the problem that Harris, as his replacement, did not have a credible record of her own on which to run a conventional presidential campaign.
So instead, they came up with the alternative strategy of creating a campaign that would focus on the “joy” of the Harris candidacy while trying to distance her from the disastrous domestic and foreign policy record of the Biden presidency, and her previous record as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate.
The Harris strategy also depended upon her ability to reveal as little as possible about the details of her positions on the crucial issues in this election by sticking to her deliberately vague campaign talking points and refusing to sit for interviews with serious journalists or answer probing questions from reporters. It was similar to the strategy that Joe Biden had used during the 2020 election campaign, which he ran from the basement of his Delaware home, using the Covid pandemic as his excuse to avoid the risk of exposing his cognitive weaknesses to the voters.
HARRIS HAS BEEN FORCED TO TALK ABOUT THE ISSUES
The tactic worked well for the Harris campaign for the first few weeks after she replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, but eventually, the novelty of her presidential candidacy began to wear off. A sharp contrast became increasingly obvious between the readiness of Trump and his campaign to explain his positions on the issues in detail and to answer any questions about it from all comers, and Harris’ refusal to explain why she is running away from her own extremely liberal record as a U.S. Senator and a failed candidate for the Democrat 2020 presidential nomination.
Harris also refused to accept her responsibility for the failed policies of the Biden administration in which she served as a “border czar” who did nothing to stop the unprecedented flow of at least 10 million illegal immigrants and who cast the tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate for Biden’s record liberal spending bills which touched off the most ruinous spike of inflation in the past 40 years.
Even during her televised debate with Donald Trump last month, Harris was unwilling to provide straight answers to questions about her plans to bring down the high cost of living or accept responsibility for the crisis created in dozens of sanctuary cities across the country by the presence of millions of illegal immigrants.
The Harris campaign’s attempt to “run out the clock” keeping the details of her extreme liberal policies hidden from the voters up to Election Day failed when her refusal to reveal her plans as president finally began to hurt her polling numbers and embarrassed her supporters in the mainstream media whose continued willingness to participate in the coverup was critical to the strategy’s success.
HARRIS INTRODUCES BIDENOMICS II
Even before Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, clearly won his televised debate on October 1 against Harris’ running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Harris campaign felt compelled to abandon its peek-a-boo media strategy and provided a much more detailed explanation of her economic policies and plans to fight inflation, which remains the top issue for most voters. On September 25, the campaign released an 82-page document entitled the “New Way Forward” which a Wall Street Journal editorial named “Bidenomics II.” The editorial said that the document reads like it had been produced by the artificial intelligence ChatGPT program in response to a request to describe the Biden administration’s liberal economic policies using more moderate rhetoric and the verbiage of free market economists.
In fact, on the same day that the document was released, Harris sat down for her first one-on-one interview with a reporter from a major news network, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle. During that interview on the extremely pro-Democrat MSNBC cable news channel, Harris declared, “I’m a capitalist,” and promised that as president she would “seek practical solutions to problems.” But upon close inspection, the editorial said, her “practical solutions” amount to little more a thinly veiled recycling of the Biden administration’s failed liberal economic policies which the voters have already rejected, with the addition of a few tweaks and new economic proposals, which received a decidedly mixed reaction from most economists.
Taken all together, the list of new federal spending programs in Harris’ proposal, which include a child tax credit of $6,000 for the parents of a newborn child, and a $25,000 grant towards the down payment of first-time house buyers, will cost an estimated total of $1.7 trillion. When asked by MSNBC reporter Ruhle how she proposes to pay for those handouts, Harris responded, “We’re going to have to raise corporate taxes.” Harris had previously announced that she intends to raise the current corporate tax rate from 21%, where it was by Trump’s 2017 tax cut, to 28%,
WHERE WILL HARRIS GET THE MONEY FROM?
Ruhle then asked Harris how she would finance those spending proposals if Republicans take control of the Senate in the November election and don’t agree to let her raise corporate taxes. “Where do you get the money [$1.7 trillion] to do that? Do you still go for those plans and borrow [adding to the $35 trillion federal deficit]?”
Harris’ response was to simply insist, “We’re going to have to raise corporate taxes.” She then repeated the familiar liberal Democrat talking point, declaring, “We’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. That’s just it. It’s about paying their fair share.” But Harris refused, as Democrats always do, to tell us exactly how much they think that “fair share” amounts to, or to acknowledge the fact that the top 1% of people by income in the United States are already paying 45% of the total amount of federal taxes being collected each year.
Harris also dodged a question from Ruhle about how she would prevent U.S. corporations from avoiding the increase in corporate taxes by simply moving their corporate headquarters to another country with a much lower corporate tax rate, such as Ireland whose rate is 12.5%. She claimed that the corporate CEOs that she has talked to would be willing to pay the increased tax rate, ignoring the fact that Trump reduced the corporate tax rate to 21% because the prior 35% rate had prompted many American companies to move to foreign countries.
HARRIS CALLS FOR PRICE CONTROLS OF FOOD AND IMMIGRATION AMNESTY
Similarly, Harris could not explain to Ruhle how she intended to end corporate price gouging on food and groceries without trying to impose price controls on supermarkets, which have proven to be unworkable in countries around the world that have tried them before.
Instead, Harris then grew defensive, telling Ruhle, “Just to be very frank, I am never going to apologize for going after companies and corporations that take advantage of the desperation of the American people,” and then added, without any further explanation, that her proposed federal ban on price gouging is “part of a much more comprehensive plan on what we can do to bring down the cost of living.”
When asked what she would do to help communities that are already “at capacity” due to the influx of illegal immigrants that entered this country on her watch as Biden’s border czar,” she again refused to give a direct answer to the question. Instead, Harris resorted to repeating a highly controversial Democrat talking point which amounts to a demand for amnesty legalizing the more than 10 million immigrants already living in this country illegally, and giving them citizenship so that they can then vote for Democrat candidates.
“We need a comprehensive plan that includes what we need to do to fortify not only our border but deal with the fact that we also need to create pathways for people to earn citizenship,” Harris said.
COSTS VS, JOBS
In a separate analysis of Harris’ economic proposals, Wall Street Journal reporters Justin Lahart and Andrew Restuccia said that they detected a change of emphasis which put more emphasis on lowering costs to consumers in contrast to Biden’s policies which focused more directly on creating more unionized jobs.
The Wall Street Journal editorial also critiqued many of the other proposals in Harris’ plan, and its similarities to President Biden’s economic proposals which he could not get through Congress. These include the raising of the top tax rate on capital gains from the current 20% to 33%, which is not quite as bad as Biden’s proposal to raise it to 44.6%.
Harris also endorses the controversial Biden’s proposal to impose for the first time a tax on unrealized capital gains. That means that if you own an asset that increases in value, you would have to pay 25% of that increase out of your pocket at the end of the year as a federal tax, even if you haven’t sold that asset yet.
The Harris proposals amount to a government-imposed income redistribution scheme through the imposition of punitively higher taxes on wealthy investors and profitable big businesses to finance more big government spending, social welfare programs, and new entitlements for child care, preschool education, long-term care, and paid leave.
Harris also would allow the 2017 Trump corporate tax, which fueled a surge in business investments, to expire in 2025, while Trump if elected would seek to make those cuts permanent.
Harris has offered various proposals to make housing more affordable and to alleviate the current nationwide housing shortage by stimulating the construction of 3 million new housing units. However, the high cost of housing is largely due to the sharp increase in mortgage interest rates that became necessary to bring down the spike in inflation, which, in turn, was triggered by the excess spending of the Biden-Harris administration. Similarly, the extra 10 million illegal immigrants who have entered this country because of the Biden-Harris open border policies have contributed to the nationwide shortage of housing.
EXTENDING FEDERAL CONTROL OVER HOUSING AND MEDICAL CARE
The Wall Street Journal editorial also points out that some of the Harris proposals to stimulate housing construction would effectively put local zoning and building codes under federal control. Harris has also proposed to use the federal tax code to impose a nationwide rent control system, and to use federal antitrust laws to punish landlords who “dramatically raise rents.”
Harris would extend federal control over the American healthcare system by extending the current Obamacare requirements on private health insurance to employer-provided healthcare plans. She also would expand Medicare drug price controls, which would reduce the profit incentive for pharmaceutical companies to invest in the development of new drugs.
Harris is also asking for $100 billion in new federal tax credits for investment in various high-tech industries which would enable Democrats to distribute them to the businesses owned by their big campaign contributors, as well as changes in federal labor laws that would give more power to Democrat-supporting labor unions. She also wants more money for “green energy” projects to subsidize solar panels and electric vehicles in addition to the $1.2 trillion already in the spending pipeline due to the passage in 2022 of the Biden-Harris administration’s cynically misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
The list goes on.
TRUMP’S ECONOMIC POLICIES HAVE BEEN PROVEN TO WORK
By contrast, there is no mystery at all about the nature of Trump’s economic proposals, which build upon the tax-cutting and regulation-reducing policies he pursued with great success during his four years in office. Not only would Trump make the provisions of his 2017 tax cut permanent, but he would also eliminate federal income taxes on tip income for service workers, Social Security retirement benefits, and overtime pay.
Trump’s initial method for reducing the high prices due to inflation would be to end the Biden-Harris administration’s war on the fossil fuel industry and encourage the production of more domestic energy, sharply reducing the cost of oil and natural gas, and enabling those energy savings to filter through every sector of the American economy to the consumers.
At the same time, Trump would move to cancel the more than a trillion dollars in federal green energy subsidies, the forced transition from gas-powered to electric vehicles, and the pressure to phase out existing natural gas, oil, and coal-powered generating plants, to maintain the reliability and affordability of the nation’s electric power grid.
Trump has also promised to revitalize the manufacturing sector of the American economy by increasing tariffs on all imported goods. This would immediately make American-made products more price competitive in the domestic marketplace and give foreign countries a powerful incentive to negotiate more equitable trading agreements with the United States in order to reduce the tariffs on their goods.
TRUMP’S 20-POINT CAMPAIGN PLATFORM
The Trump campaign has encapsulated the main policy proposals for his second term into a concise 20-point campaign platform:
- Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion
- Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history
- End inflation, and make America affordable again
- Make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!
- Stop outsourcing, and turn the United States into a manufacturing superpower
- Large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!
- Defend our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms
- Prevent World War Three, restore peace in Europe and the Middle East, and build a great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our entire country — all made in America
- End the weaponization of government against the American people
- Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders
- Rebuild our cities, including Washington D.C., making them safe, clean, and beautiful again
- Strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world
- Keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency
- Fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age
- Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations
16, Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children
- Keep men out of women’s sports
- Deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again
- Secure our elections, including same-day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship
- Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success
CONSEQUENCES OF BIDEN’S FOREIGN POLICY FAILURES
One of the most important issues in the presidential campaign, which has not received as much attention as it deserves, is the failure of the Biden administration’s foreign policies on many different levels, beginning with the botched withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 which seriously undermined America’s reputation as the leader of the Free World. Many believe that the weakness revealed by the Afghan fiasco emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to ignore American warnings and invade Ukraine.
Similarly, the Biden administration’s misguided efforts to revive the seriously flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal by failing to enforce the sanctions on Iran’s economy and paying a $6 billion ransom to Iran for the release of five wrongfully imprisoned Americans, emboldened Iran’s leader to continue supporting their terrorist proxies in the region, which led to the heinous October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas killing 1200 Israeli civilians and soldiers, the taking of 250 hostages from southern Israel, and the start of the current war in Gaza which has now spread to Lebanon.
During his four years in the White House, Donald Trump proved himself to be the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House. Trump’s many actions while president to bolster Israel’s legitimacy and protect it from its enemies include formally recognizing Yerushalayim as Israel’s capital and relocating the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv; recognizing the legitimacy of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and its annexation of the Golan Heights; cutting off U.S. government aid to the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA; suspending U.S. participation in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and reimposing U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil sales; and ordering the assassination in 2020 of General Qasem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who was in charge of Iran’s relations with its terrorist proxy forces, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
THE LIMITS OF BIDEN’S SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL
The immediate reaction of President Biden to the October 7 attack, pledging his full support for Israel’s right to defend itself and unequivocally condemning Hamas was outstanding. But while he fulfilled his pledge to provide Israel with the weaponry and diplomatic support that it needed to continue its fight for survival, Biden’s unfair public criticism of the Israeli government for how it has fought the war in Gaza has been disappointing.
The Biden administration has also failed to take action against Iran for its encouragement of Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iran’s other terrorist proxies in the region to join in the attacks on Israel.
The Biden administration has also engaged in unacceptable efforts to pressure Israel to agree to a ceasefire and hostage exchange deal on Hamas’ terms and to force Israel to resume the failed negotiations with the corrupt Palestinian Authority on a two-state solution which neither side wants, as part of the deal to end the war in Gaza.
The Biden administration has also reportedly threatened to withhold weapons shipments and support for Israel if it goes forward with a serious retaliation against Iran for its second mass missile attack on Israel on October 1.
The Israeli government has been forced to conclude that the restrictions that the Biden administration has sought to impose on it would prevent Israel from achieving full victory against Hamas and Hezbollah, endangering its national security. Meanwhile, former President Trump has called upon Israel to defeat Hamas as quickly as possible and to carry out its threats to retaliate against Iran by attacking its nuclear weapons program, which poses a serious threat to Israel’s survival.
HARRIS’ SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL REMAINS IN DOUBT. TRUMP’S IS NOT
Vice President Harris has also publicly expressed her support for Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks by Hamas and Iran. But at the same time, like Biden, she has unfairly blamed Israel for the large number of civilian casualties during the war in Gaza which is the fault of Hamas for systematically using the civilians as human shields.
Harris also clearly implied during a televised interview with CBS News, that she does not view Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as a reliable ally of the United States. Given her longstanding ties to the increasingly antisemitic and pro-Palestinian progressive wing of the Democrat Party, there is reason to fear that as president, Harris would not be as supportive of Israel as President Biden has been.
By contrast, if he is elected president on November 5, there is no doubt that Donald Trump would give his full support to Israel’s efforts to protect its people against attack and to achieve full victory against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. At the same time, Trump can also be counted upon to act to protect American Jews from the growing threat of domestic antisemitism.
Trump’s unapologetic America First policies will help keep the country militarily strong and safe from its enemies around the world, while his support for traditional American democratic and moral values will protect our constitutional rights to live as Jews and openly teach and practice our beliefs without fear.
