Trump Landslide Explained

“I said to my team, I said guys something is happening on these campuses and the media was ignoring it in fact we were mocked on social media by all this the intelligentsia of the political establishment, on the right and the left saying ‘oh you know the the polls show that younger voters are gonna (sic.) go for Kamala Harris like never before,’ and I said, ‘maybe, but what I’m seeing is unlike anything I’ve seen before,” Charlie Kirk, CEO of Turning Point

SB Veda

The pollsters and many pundits including America’s election Nostradamus, Professor Allan Lichtman whose “keys” methodology had previously predicted the correct outcomes for nine of the last ten elections, were totally wrong. The race was predicted to be ‘tighter than a too -ight bikini on a too-long ride from the beach,” to quote legendary anchor, Dan Rather’s colourful metaphor from ten years back. Though a liberal, his words would be called misogynistic among today’s Democrats, for misogyny along with sexism and racism were listed as popular reasons or rather rationalizations for Kamal Harris’ loss to Trump in a landslide.

After the Arizona vote count was complete, Donald Trump’s final victory tally stands at 312 electoral votes to 226 for Harris. In an environment in which the United States was said to be divided 50-50, it is not unreasonable to call the result a landslide victory for Donald J. Trump.

THE BLAME GAME

As soon as it looked like Harris was going to lose, Democrats started pointing fingers:

For those who disagreed with the pick of Harris as a candidate (she had been considered a far worse candidate than Biden before he could no longer credibly go on), Biden should never have ran and a full-throated primary process would have taken place (though it was the DNC who prevented any real challenge to Biden so as not to weaken a candidate whom they would have certainly known was a shadow of his former self). Others said should have been a contest after Biden stepped down (even though it was the Democratic elites who crowned Harris as the nominee without any discussion or debate within the rank and file of the party).

For most, it was considered blasphemous to hint that Harris was anything less than the ideal candidate, thwarted by an electorate that was “uneducated and misinformed” (Sunny Hostin, The View), “sexist and misogynistic” (concluded by at least one analyst on every major cable network except Fox News), and just plain racist, despite having elected Barack Obama to two consecutive terms, the first in a landslide.

Some people started blaming George Clooney whose July New York Times Op Ed, published with Barack Obama’s blessing (read that to mean complicity), by the way, spurred calls for Biden’s ouster. It’s not as if Biden would have been a viable candidate had Clooney not expressed his doubts. Moreover, it is unlikely Biden would have been able to do much better than Kamala as it was his unpopular policies, particularly on the economy tied to spending hundreds of billions of dollars supporting foreign wars and the open border from which Harris was unsuccessful in detaching herself, which pushed many into Trump’s camp.

The vitriol with which many Harris supporters have thrown at Clooney, despite his endorsement of her and the tens of millions, which he raised for the ticket, is really quite disgusting. Rather than blaming a vapid candidate who repeated empty slogans and was equally empty when it came to policy details (remember this, “I’ve got a lot of polices, you can find them on my website.”) scapegoating Clooney seems more palatable. Does the fact that he is a rich white male make it alright to unfairly vilify him? He had nothing to do with Harris’ loss.

HARRIS WAS JUST A BAD CANDIDATE

Harris, despite an impressive debate performance against Trump, simply failed to connect with voters. She appeared out of touch. Even the throngs of Hollywood stars who flocked to a massive Zoom meeting hosted by icon Oprah Winfrey, couldn’t help her. At the Zoom conference, Oprah focused attention on the trauma faced by 15-year-old Natalie Griffith who had been shot in two places during a school shooting in Atlanta. Her mother recounted how she found out, and had to run two miles to the school because of barricades on the road leading up to the school. Oprah interrupted her, saying, “And, you have a message for us,” but the mother pressed on, stating, “I want to finish my story because no parent should go through this,” For any parent, such a story is an account of their worst nightmare.

Harris responded by saying that saying one is either in favour of the second amendment or not is a false choice, adding, “I’m in favour of the Second Amendment but I’m also in favour of assault weapon bans, background checks, it’s just common sense.” Oprah mentioned that Harris said at the debate against Trump that she owned a gun. Harris made light of the remark.

“If anybody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris crowed within a minute of the harrowing story of recounted by Mrs. Griffith. The lack of sensitivity to the plight of the victim of a mass shooting and her family was disturbingly and glaringly on display in Harris’ remarks. She put an exclamation mark on the statement by saying it might get her “in trouble” but her staff would fix that, cackling away, characteristically. One wonders how other victims of gun violence might feel at Harris’ flippant reaction to the Griffith family’s traumatic tale.

A young couple, Rachel and Garret recounted their having to move in with their parents to save up for a down payment on a house because the cost of living is so high. When they were able to afford to buy the house, interest rate hikes impeded their ability to pay the mortgage, requiring them to let out part of the house to the Rachel’s sister and brother-in-law to pay their mortgage. Rachel asked the Vice President, “We’d really like to know what your plan is to help lower the cost of living.”

Harris responded with her typical word salad, saying, “Yours is a story I hear around the country as I travel and um in terms of both rightly having the right to have aspirations and dreams and ambitions for your family and working hard…” Stuggling to find a concrete policy point that would address Rachel’s question, she mentioned her $25,000 grant to first-time home buyers, which does nothing for Rachel and Garret’s situation, having already bought a house. The words “Opportunity Economy” was flung at the couple, Harris neglecting to define what that would mean in concrete terms for the couple, ending with a $50,000 tax credit for start-ups. Oprah didn’t mention whether the couple were starting a business, but odds are, they weren’t. People planning to start businesses usually don’t qualify for home loans for which stability is required such as having a steady pay cheque. With a baby in their family and probably each having a job, it is doubtful that the struggling couple has the time or money to start a business. In other words, Harris did nothing to address Rachel’s question.
The Q&A was typical Kamal Harris. The more she talked in generalities repeating the same tired lines about “dreams and aspirations and hard work,” and her “opportunity economy,” the less confidence she inspired. This is not just true of that Zoom call but also of the whole campaign.

THE DISPARITY OF THE VEEP PICKS

Initially, it seemed that Trump had blundered in picking J.D. Vance, a one-term US senator, businessman, and author. His remark in a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, came back to haunt him. He complained that the country was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

The internet became rife with cat lady memes. Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon. Even Jennifer Aniston, not known to be politically active, commented on her Instagram feed: “I truly cannot believe this is coming from a potential VP. All I can say is … Mr Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”

Vance’s instinct was to dig in, not long after the remark resurfaced, doubling down on the remark, insisting that his sarcasm was “willfully misinterpreted” by Democrats – only to admit in October that what he said was “dumb.”

Tim Walz, by contrast was seen as a clever pick by Harris. Down to earth, a former football coach, with a folksy manner and ability for self-deprecation, it was thought, might help the ticket connect with voters. Following the tradition of Obama and Biden, Harris chose a VP candidate who was incapable of outshining her. This was burnished by her apostle-like deference to Harris.

He scored points with Harris and her advisors before being picked by calling Trump and Vance, “weird.” Many democrats had wanted Harris to choose Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of Pennsylvania, which was a ‘must win’ swing state for Harris. Moreover, like her, he reflected the future of the Democratic party. With both of them on the ticket, many felt, the message of Biden ‘passing the torch’ to a new generation of leadership, would have resonated with the electorate. Instead, she went with Walz who repeated whose weird comment was replayed over and over again by the media.

When certain facts about his life emerged, it was Walz who began to seem far outside the spectrum of “normal.” It started with lies about his military service when he remarked that he was in favour of banning weapons of war, “that I carried in war.” Walz, despite being a member of the Minnesota National Guard never actually went to war. He decided to retire after finding out his unit was being deployed to Iraq. Walz said he misspoke giving a “weird” reason for the falsehood: “I think people are coming to get to know me. I speak like they do. I speak candidly. I wear my emotions on my sleeves,” Walz said.

Walz again made a false claim in his convention speech that he and his wife used in vitro fertilisation to conceive their children, which when caught, he shrugged off saying that he spoke passionately about fertility issues.

He also said he was in Hong Kong on June 4th when the Red Chinese Government massacred pro-democracy activists at Tiananmen Square in 1989. He told that story over and over again for over ten years, including during a 2009 hearing of a Congressional-Executive Commission on China that commemorated the Tiananmen Square protests. When questioned on this during the VP debate against Vance, he simply said he was, “a knucklehead.” Somehow this reasoning was accepted by the moderator. Probably not so by the American people.

Questions began to be raised about why both Walz and his wife resigned as teachers from the school at which they were teaching in the middle of the semester. A whisper campaign, uninvestigated by the media, alleged that he had misbehaved with male students. The claims also mentioned Walz visiting a gay bar with the student, which allegedly led to a school board investigation. It was around this time that the joint resignation occurred. The minutes of a schoolboard meeting records the unanimous acceptance of the joint resignation by the board.

The Vice-Presidential debate was a flashpoint. While it’s a truism that voters don’t make their decisions based on who is at the bottom of the ticket, increasingly, it’s becoming important to have the right person be ‘a heartbeat away from the presidency.’

Walz who had already lowered expectations by stating he was a bad debater got eviscerated by JD Vance. Some thought Vance would be combative and aggressive due how he appeared in previous media interactions. On the contrary, he was calm, controlled, and restrained. Indeed, he was even gracious to Tim Walz when Walz lied once again about his son witnessing a shooting. (The Gus Walz, the candidate’s son, according to the police report, was actually inside of the recreation centre when a shooting occurred outside; he never actually witnessed the shooting, though he may have heard the gunfire.) Rather than question this claim, Vance was comforting to Walz, saying “I didn’t know your seventeen year-old witnessed a shooting. I’m so sorry about that….Christ have mercy, it is awful.”

Vance then went on a media blitz appearing before hostile interviewers, and handled himself masterfully. The concerns of doubters about Vance’s fitness to take over should anything happened to Donald Trump were allayed Vance’s performance both at the debate and at interviews since. Whereas Walz, following the debate, was but in a media box. Particularly on the Hong Kong lie, he had embarrassed himself, and as the whispers about inappropriate, possibly criminal conduct, as a teacher became louder on social media, keeping Walz out of the spotlight became essential to the campaign, which then became focused on Harris who stepped out of her media box and began to give interviews.

STORMS, STORMY DANIELS, AND STORMY ALLEGATIONS

It’s interesting how Trump’s alleged dalliance with former adult film star has been reported on ad nauseum in the press (Joe Biden even brought it up in the Presidential debate that ended up going disastrously for him and resulted in his ouster by fellow Democrats). In the end, Trump’s alleged affair did not affect him electorally. He was never running for ‘most loyal husband’ and most people considered his marriage issues to be a personal matter. It became a legal one when allegations that he had diverted campaign funds in his first campaign for President to silence Daniels led to gratuitous details in court filings being unsealed by a judge, making it part of the public record while the case itself was not pursued. However, the press wouldn’t touch the Walz allegations even though a former student had made very serious allegations against him. The fact that the student became a drug addict, perhaps because of what he may have endured, eroded his credibility in the press. Nobody touched it.

Other allegations of Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, that he physically abused a woman he was dating in public, which has contemporaneous corroboration was only published in The Daily Mail, which the mainstream legacy media rubbished along with Democrats. Had the women herself come forward, the allegations could not have been ignored but she, being a prominent lawyer, was fearful that Emhoff with the backing of a potential president at his side, would face retribution – and she didn’t want her career to suffer.

What is not in dispute is that Emhoff’s previous marriage collapsed because of an affair he had with his daughter’s teacher who was hired as the family nanny, that she got pregnant, and that she alleges his mistreatment of her (she doesn’t provide specifics) caused her to miscarry. It is a matter of record that Emhoff paid her $80,000 in a settlement related to these allegations. However, this kind of behaviour was not deemed to be newsworthy.

Rather, Emhoff was portrayed in the press as ‘redefining masculinity,’ portraying him as a feminist who supported his ambitious wife, Kamala. This is similar to how allegations of sexual assault against Joe Biden brought up by Tara Reid were rubbished as a Russian plot (because she fled to Moscow fearing repercussions when Biden became President). It seems so far in the past that the principle that women coming forward to speak up against abuse at the hands of powerful men, should be believed, seems to have ended with the Biden campaign’s dismissal of the Tara Reid allegations.

It’s not that Emhoff and Walz brought down the Harris campaign – but dark allegations lurking in the shadows do not help a candidacy for the highest position in the land, which already must weather many storms.

On the topic of storms, Harris’ response to hurricanes in North Carolina and Florida left something to be desired. President Biden, when questioned about Hurricane Helene, appeared to forget the storm. After Florida governor Rick DeSantis refused to take Kamala Harris’ phone call regarding Hurricane Milton, saying that Harris had never shown any interest in the hurricanes that had hit Florida in the previous three plus years of her tenure, was simply posturing for the cameras. Harris snapped back saying DeSantis was playing politics, though Biden contradicted her lauding the Florida governor on his cooperation with the administration.

It didn’t help that surrogates and Harris supporters on social media claimed that the people of these Red states (meaning Republican majority states) were being punished by God for supporting Trump. During times of natural disaster, most Americans expect the country to unite. This divisive pettiness did not go down well with voters.

WHITE WOMEN AND LATINOS

White women, apparently, voted for Trump by a slim 2% margin. The Harris campaign had premised that most women, irrespective of background, would back a female candidate. This reliance on mere identity politics was wrong calculation. The expectation that women would vote for a woman simply because they shared the same body parts, was disproven by the election result.

A false narrative was created around Trump that he would make abortion illegal at the Federal level. Trump and his campaign countered by saying it was always his position that the matter should be decided at the state level – and he was committed to vetoing any Federal ban on abortion. Trump, himself, supported abortion being available within the first twelve weeks of a pregnancy. By stoking dubious fears of Trump imposing a Victorian agenda on women, the Harris campaign actually harmed their chances with women who were informed of the debate. These women were then called “uneducated” or “misinformed” by people like Sunny Hostin of The View. Hostin lives in a state where abortion is available on demand; hence, her claims that her daughter would have fewer rights than her under Trump was utterly false.

Many women have male partners, sons, fathers, and male relatives. They got tired the Democrats ‘war on men’ and chose to support a candidate who did not stoke the gender divide.

To say that minority men were responsible for Trump’s win is both true and false. Harris still won the majority of Black and Latino voters. However, Trump gained 14% among Latinos and doubled his standing among black men, especially young men.

This prompted the Harris campaign to bring out Barack Obama who went to a campaign event in Pennsylvania and proceeded to lecture and shame black voters whom he called, “the brothers.” Obama had been a skilled campaigner, especially when delivering messages of unity and hope. However, “Professor Obama,” his lecturing face was never popular – and it seemed to have the opposite effect on Black men who expressed their outrage on social media. “You’re not my brother,” said many. Indeed, worth more than 70 million dollars according to Forbes Magazine, many felt the elite Obama was talking down to them. They also didn’t accept the narrative that Harris understood their experience, being a millionaire herself. Moreover, many hadn’t forgotten her prosecution of black males, including one wrongful prosecution. Interestingly, questioning her about her record as a prosecutor were agreed in advance between the Harris campaign and TV networks as being off-limits.

IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID
In 2024, Democrats forgot that all important electoral catch phrase coined by former Bill Clinton advisor, James Carville. The most important issue in any election is the economy.

Voters were all too aware that prices, the cost of housing, the price of fuel and the cost of living in general was significantly higher under the Biden-Harris administration than that of Donald J. Trump’s.

Harris tried to explain it away by blaming price rises on Covid-19 but spending over 200 Billion dollars to fund foreign wars and ballooning the Federal deficit in the process, as the International Monetary Fund has stated on its website.

Hence, Harris’ canard that inflation in the USA has been caused by price gouging is without much basis in economic fact as Tracy Miller of The Hill writes:

“There is plenty of competition among farmers, processors, wholesalers and retailers to attract inflation-weary customers and keep prices down.
Supermarkets earn a profit margin on sales of approximately 2 percent.
Inflation results from government monetary and fiscal policy, not from corporate greed.
With the federal government running deficits close to $2 trillion a year and growing, and with no plan to raise taxes to pay back the debt, those who own government bonds have good reason to expect those bonds to decline in value.
This motivates people to try to sell their bonds in exchange for other things, increasing demand for and driving up the prices of goods and services. This is one big reason why inflation rose so drastically in 2021 and 2022.
Also, as plenty of astute observers have pointed out, during the pandemic, the government added $5 trillion of stimulus spending with no plans to raise taxes to pay for it. Americans consequently increased their spending on goods and services and demand expanded rapidly relative to supply.”

It is, in fact, in line with basic economic theory that when prices are capped, problems with supply occur, the supply chain can be affected, and companies become forced to substitute for inferior products.

Notwithstanding who is advising Harris, as a lawyer, she has not been educated in such issues. That said, as Wharton School of Finance alumnus, Donald Trump correctly points out: the price of goods is linked to transportation costs, which go up when the cost of fuel rises. His response, “Drill baby drill!” While this belies efforts to cut carbon emissions, and as an environmentalist, I cannot agree with the approach, increasing the supply of oil will bring prices down. It offers a means to address rising costs of basic goods, but it does come with consequences. Still, that’s a debate that the American people ought to have had during the election but didn’t due to the gimmicks offered by the Harris campaign on the economy.

Giving out free money is another such gimmick like the $25,000 grant offered to first-time homebuyers promised by Harris. Rather than helping first-time homebuyers, this would have caused inflation in the housing market, in general, making it more expensive for all buyers to buy a house.

Also, by taking credit for lowering the price of insulin, she participated in yet another lie. Trump had already lowered insulin prices to the same level but these polices were scrapped by the Biden-Harris administration only to be replaced with policies yielding the very same result.

The child tax credit that Harris offered is only $1,000 more than that in the Trump-Vance platform. That may seem significant, but it amounts to less than $20/week. The credit offered a distinction without any real difference.

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

People under thirty had generally polled for Democrats. Biden got 60% of young voters in 2020. While Harris still got the majority of the young vote at 54%, the enthusiasm for young people in swing states may have made the difference, particularly young men.

Notably, abortion, which was the top issue among young voters during most of the campaign, cratered by the fall. In 2022 when the campaigning began, at least for Republicans, 44% of young people asserted that abortion was the issue, which they prioritized the most. By the autumn of 2024, exit polls had the issue at only 13%. It had been supplanted by the economy as the top priority among young people – and issue that Trump, based on economic performance from 2016-2020 against sky-rocketing inflation and interest rates under Biden-Harris over the last three and a half years, polled much better than Harris.

Despite Harris’ plan for a tax break for small businesses, most small business owners favoured Trump for his promises on tax relief, overall.

Speaking to The Guardian, Political Scientist, Melissa Deckman, who specializes in the study of age, gender, and religion on politics explained how the Harris campaign failed to reach young men: “the Democratic party didn’t have a convincing message for a lot of young men, especially on the economy. Secondly: Donald Trump’s decision to meet young men where they are – going on Joe Rogan – it sent the message that he cared about their votes. When you don’t have someone willing to fight for your votes and talk about your interests, you’re less interested in voting for that party,” Deckman said.

Similarly, political scientist Richard Reeves commented on Harris’ failure to meet expectations regarding in reaching young women just as Trump overperformed with the Trump-leaning demographic of young men: “The expectation was we’re going to see this break towards Trump among men overall and we’re going to see a break towards Kamala Harris among women overall. But only half of that really seemed to come true. Trump did overperform among young men, but Harris underperformed among young women. That is a surprise,” remarked Reeves.

Reeves added: “Even my progressive feminist friends were watching the DNC and saying: “Is there going to be anything for men?” Whereas the RNC was a carnival of masculinity. The Republicans put out a welcome mat there for men and said: “We can see you, we’re cool with you being guys, we like guys, the Democrats hate you, they think you’re the problem.”

Charlie Kirk, former aide to Donald Trump Jr., and founder of Turning Point Inc., was active on college campuses stumping for the Trump campaign. Many of his interactions, particularly with young women voters to try to convince them that Trump was not the scary fascist potrayed by the media, and Harris wasn’t the second coming, were caught on video and circulated on social media. Indeed, one such video of Kirk asking a Harris supporting female college student to explain why she thought Trump was a racist, ended up without a response from the woman – and Kirk suggesting that her conclusion was based on media representations of a false narrative. The video got sixty million views on TikTok – a platform most used by young people.

Speaking to Megyn Kelly on her podcast in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, Kirk talked about visiting over twenty-five college campuses since the start of the fall semester. “It’s the most I’ve ever done,” he said.

Kirk’s goal was to create a “digital movement” among young people for undecided voters by holding interactions and dialogues with people that were unscripted and to which nobody was barred. He told Kelly that this contrasted with events held by Democrats. “It (his interaction with young people) was so real when so much of this campaign on the Democrat side was fake and synthetic,” Kirk said, adding: “and so here we were with the most real thing you can do which is to set up a table and talk to people that are 180 degrees opposed to you.”

Kirk said that his organization drew 2000 people at the University of Wisconsin Maddison. In doing this for twelve years, Kirk hadn’t encountered crowds of such large number. “I turned to
my team I said is this an anomaly …all of a sudden we did three or four more and it was becoming the rule,” said Kirk.

“I said to my team, I said guys something is happening on these campuses and the media was ignoring it in fact we were mocked on social media by all this the intelligentsia of the political establishment, on the right and the left saying ‘oh you know the the polls show that younger voters are gonna (sic.) go for Kamala Harris like never before,’ and I said, ‘maybe, but what I’m seeing is unlike anything I’ve seen before,” Kirk added.

Instead of leaving campuses after their events were going, where Kirk’s ground team encountered first-time voters who were leaning towards voting for Trump, they registered these first-time voters to vote, translating the observed support into viable Trump voters.

Kirk recounted how GOP political strategist, Mark McKinnon who was not a Trump supporter and had written in Vanity Fair that Harris would win, found out about these events, and asked to attend one. Kirk took him to the University of Georgia where his organization drew 5,000 students. McKinnon apparently said, “I thought Kamala was going to win – now, I’m not so sure.”

The impact of young people could not be accurately quantified, but Kirk believes that in swing states, which is where his organization focused their efforts, young people may have made the decisive difference. Trump won all the swing states – and this was key to his landslide victory.

EXPANDING THE TENT – TRUMP BENEFITS AT THE EXPENSE OF HARRIS

An unusual aspect of the 2024 election is how politics has, from a foreign policy perspective, been turned on its head. The Bush era Neocons of the Republican Party like Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, Bill Kristol, David Frum, Alberto Gonzalez, and staffers who worked for some 200 Bush era Republicans endorsed Kamala Harris.

The Cheney endorsement, in particular, was problematic from Harris as he was seen as the mastermind of the campaign to produce trumped up intelligence and lie to the American people that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to justify the Iraq war, which resulted in somewhere between 500,000-1 million deaths (with some thirty-two thousand American casualties including wounded).

In an article called, “Remembering Why Americans Loath Dick Cheney,” published in the Atlantic Monthly, a fixture in the Democratic Party media establishment, staff writer Conor Friedersdorf wrote the following in 2011: “Cheney undercut the CIA by instructing subordinates in that agency to stovepipe raw intelligence directly to his office. He also worked with Donald Rumsfeld to establish an alternative intelligence agency within the Pentagon. Both of these actions directly contributed to the faulty information that informed the decision to go to war.”

He went on, stating “In December 2008, Dick Cheney acknowledged what many had long suspected or known: that he was instrumental in initiating the Bush Administration interrogation tactic in which detainees were blindfolded, strapped to a board, and held down as water was poured into their cavities until their lungs began to fill up with it. The intent was to trick the detainees into believing that they would drown. Almost sounds like a mock execution, doesn’t it? Christopher Hitchens gamely subjected himself to the procedure, knowing he could stop it at any time. His conclusion: “If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

Indeed, in his seminal article, GQ writer Wil S. Hyton described how Cheney undercut the CIA by instructing the agency to send raw intelligence directly to his office. He also worked with Donald Rumsfeld to establish an alternative intelligence agency within the Pentagon. Both of these actions directly contributed to the faulty information that informed the decision to go to war. Cheney championed use of Iraqi dissident, Ahmed Chalabi who is described by Al Jazeera as, “a willing and a proud pawn for the neo-cons and warmongers in Washington and the West, and he provided them an Iraqi/Arab name that lent “authenticity” to a deliberate campaign of deceit and lies – with the aim of justifying the invasion of Iraq to American and global public opinion.”

Chalabi had left Iraq in the 1980s and helped establish an Islamic bank called Petra Bank from which he was accused of embezzling an amount estimated to be sixty million dollars. The alleged crook supplied Bush neocons with false intelligence about stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons kept in Iraq by the regime of Saddam Hussein, assertions, which were at odds with what UN weapons inspectors had determined. Cheney, however, used this false information to make the case for the US to go to war on the grounds that Hussein had the capacity to carry-out a cataclysmic strike on the USA along the lines of 9/11.

Cheney also approved no-bid contracts to Haliburton – an energy service company for which Dick Cheney after forming ties with the company as Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush, became its CEO and resigned prior to being named Vice-President under George W. Bush. The no-bid contracts earned Haliburton 38 billion dollars over the course of the war and reconstruction of Iraq. Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne Cheney, remained on the Haliburton Board of Directors as the company benefited from her husband’s policy decisions – refusing to respond to allegations of conflict of interest. Dick Cheney was rewarded for his role in Haliburton’s Iraq War windfall by granting him over a million stock options, which he cashed in to the tune of approximately $10 million earning him the title of war profiteer by the Democrats.

When Cheney endorsed Harris, she said she was “honored” to receive his endorsement. She then had Cheney’s daughter, Liz who had been drummed out of the Wyoming Republican Party, where the Cheneys had been extremely influential since Dick Cheney was a Wyoming Congressman 1979 to 1989. Liz Cheney held the same seat her father had in 2016 before losing in the Wyoming Republican Primary contest in 2022, failing to garner even 30% of the vote.

Trump exploited Harris’ chumminess with the Cheneys, addressing Arab Americans in Michigan where they hold the highest percentage population of any state. Despite enacting a temporary ban on Muslims upon taking office in 2016, Trump wooed the constituency by saying that, “nobody had killed more Muslims than Dick Cheney.” Harris lost the state of Michigan.

CULTURE WARS

Democrats for long have been pro LGBTQ+, their issues seen within the lens of human rights. However, when individuals who were born male competed in competitive sports both in girls’ sports and women athletics, it created problems. Those who were born male were shown to have a hormonal advantage compared to women, enabling them to perform better than they otherwise would have. I have a friend who, being a champion powerlifter in Canada, was pushed out of the sport due to participation by a trans athlete. She was suspended for calling her a male, which is not false biologically but does not jive with socially accepted norms established by the left – and which dominate most sporting organizations like the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Trans athletes with male genitalia have been granted access to female washrooms, changerooms, and formerly gender-specific private spaces. Anecdotes abound of girls being intimidated by trans athletes who apparently have described what they intend to do with their penis on these girls. Sexual assault of females by trans people in such private spaces is a risk that is actively being denied by the left.

A case in point was reported by the Associated Press: “A teenager and her parents have filed a $30 million lawsuit against a northern Virginia school system, saying the district failed to adequately investigate and tried to cover up her sexual assault by a male student in a high school bathroom.The details of the 2021 assault — the attacker was wearing a skirt in a women’s bathroom — made it a flashpoint in the national debate over allowing transgender students to use bathrooms, play sports and go by names and gender pronouns that reflect their gender identity.”

Kamala Harris was portrayed by the hero for such people, especially as she had filled a 2020 questionnaire in which she supported having the US government pay for sex-change operations for prison inmates and detained illegals. It has been well known since that males convicted of sexual offences have applied for such surgeries, so they can be housed with female inmates for reasons that should be obvious. Rape in prison is severely under-reported with victims fearing reprisals.

Trump successfully portrayed Kamala Harris as out of the mainstream on these issues with a slick ad campaign: “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.”

For undecided voters in swing states, the highest percentage of independents in states that Harris had to win to prevail, rated trans issues as no. 1 on their list of priority issues. Democrats failed to recognize how concerned many Americans were, blissfully unaware while existing in an elite and woke bubble.

Democrats will have to do a lot of introspection if they are to regain lost ground in future elections. In 2024, they clearly lost the plot.