Giant Douche vs. Turd Sandwich
Decision 2024: Really? These are our choices?
Note: I studiously avoid using profanity in my writing (that’s what Twitter is for), but this topic deserves a harsher treatment. Be forewarned. And enjoy!
As you most definitely know – unless, of course, you’ve been Rip van Winkle-ing for the past several years – the American presidential election is happening in a week’s time. This has been declared the most important election of our lives, of the past century, or even of all American history. This is obvious hyperbole, as political partisans and pundits have made this same claim for pretty much every election in the 21st century. But this time, they’re serious! The rhetoric has been ramped up to 11, with rabid, vapid partisans on both sides claiming that if you don’t vote for their preferred candidate, the American experiment as we know it will crash and burn. Either we will have ushered in a new era of American fascism, complete with our very own Orange Hitler, or we will be reduced to a DEI Communist hellhole where illegal immigrants control every house in America. The stakes couldn’t be higher, they say. You must choose either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump; there is no other option. Well, I beg to differ.
This election reminds me of nothing more than the classic season 8 episode of South Park, titled “Douche and Turd.” (As an aside, Season 8 of South Park may very well be the best season that show has ever had. And it’s a really tight competition given how good it has been for the past two-plus decades.) The episode starts with a South Park Elementary pep rally, where the students are cheering on their traditional mascot, the Cow. Just as the pep rally is reaching its peak, PETA breaks in and assaults the Cow, throwing fake blood on the student cheerleaders and forcing the school to adopt a new mascot to avoid further problems with the radical environmentalist group (a common foe in early South Park seasons). The school decided to hold an open election, where students could vote on new mascot alternatives. Kyle and Cartman wage a write-in campaign against one another to get the funniest possible mascots into the final round of voting: a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich.
The episode unfolds as a satire of American electoral politics and it hits all the marks along the way: the fact that politicians essentially bribe voters – with our tax dollars, mind you – to elect them, the idea that partisans only care about the “sacred right” of voting if you are voting for their preferred candidate, the classic debate trick of stalling and spouting utter nonsense until you are saved by the time running out, and the claim that every politician is somehow a historic ‘first’, which is lampooned perfectly by saying that, if Turd Sandwich is elected, it would be “not only the first turd, but the first sandwich” to be a mascot. The key parodic aspect of the episode was that it was a choice between two equally terrible and absurd options and everyone in town took it overly seriously, to the point where Stan was banished for not wanting to vote.
“Douche and Turd” was aired on October 27, 2004, just a week before the presidential election between the incumbent Republican George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry. It was quite obviously an allegory for that election, which Bush won in a close contest. But Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creative minds behind South Park, were two decades too early. Because the current contest between Harris and Trump makes Bush/Kerry look like Kennedy/Nixon in 1960. Kerry and Bush, regardless of their flaws, were both serious politicians who treated the presidency – and the electorate – with the respect it deserves. Harris and Trump have done nothing of the sort. Both candidates are truly awful in their own unique ways, and neither should earn your vote; they certainly haven’t earned mine. And the kicker is that this Douche and Turd weren’t brought to the final contest by trollish antics, but by the voters themselves.
I usually try to have some sort of positivity in my writing, even when I am critiquing a policy or a politician. Let’s just say that this is going to be the exception to the rule. I am not going to give any reasons why you should vote for these candidates – although there are rationales for each – but I am going to tell you exactly why you shouldn’t vote for each. I will touch on five criteria for each candidate: character, economics, foreign policy, domestic issues, and the people surrounding them. And without further ado, let the shitshow begin.
Donald Trump, Giant Douche
Character
When it comes to the issue of personal and political character, Donald Trump is second to none, quite literally. He is more likely than not the worst individual we have ever elected to the highest office in the land. Trump is a carnival barking huckster with no principles or firm beliefs whatsoever. The man is the epitome of a snake-oil salesman, always trying to pull one over on the rubes and score a deal for himself. He will say and do anything to accomplish his goals. And those goals are not the goals of the American nation writ large, they are whatever makes Donald Trump look good in the immediate moment to the particular people he is trying to please right then. He is a narcissistic buffoon, a grade A moron, a man who would do anything for celebrity. In terms of humility and smarminess, he makes Biff Tanner from Back to the Future II look like Mother Teresa. His ego is fragile, yet enormous, like a castle made from playing cards. He is easily flattered and wooed by others, changing his thoughts and ideas on a whim.
Trump is amoral and inconstant. He shifts like a flag in a very stiff breeze, but totally denies his previous positioning. He is unfaithful and disloyal, both in his marriages and his politics. He fires people left and right, but is often too chickenshit to do it to their face. He is more mercurial than an overtired toddler who had one too many sodas with dinner. He is manifestly emotionally unstable. His rhetoric is irresponsible at best and deliberately incendiary at worst. He enjoys demagoguery for the thrill it sends up his leg. He has a disturbing lack of fidelity to the law and the Constitution, which is unsurprising given his penchant for bullshit. He lies like he breathes, about the important and the trivial alike. Of course, he wouldn’t take his oath of office seriously; the man has never taken any promise in his life earnestly, whether matrimonial vows or business contracts. This has all been crystal clear for my entire lifetime for anyone who cared to pay attention. As a long-time denizen of the NYC metro area, I am well-versed in Trump and his myriad character flaws.
Unlike the folks on the left and in the Harris campaign who decry Trump as the flowering of American fascism, I simply cannot see him this way. Donald J. Trump isn’t the second coming of Hitler, he’s just a self-inflated, egotistical asshole from Queens. And believe me, that’s bad enough.
Economics
Trumpian economics is populism, but somehow even dumber. In no way is Donald Trump a traditional fiscal conservative, nor does he pretend to be one. He is currently engaged in an economic illiteracy contest with his rival, and it looks to be a dead heat. Trump has always had one particular economic idée fixe: the tariff. The man is positively obsessed with tariffs, threatening to levee them on anything and everything, from Chinese cars and Canadian hardwood to Brazilian bananas and Belgian beer. Just as his opponents on the progressive left do with respect to the minimum wage, Trump constantly raises his tariff threshold in an arbitrary and capricious manner. One day it is 10 percent, the next it is 20. One day it covers goods from adversary nations, the next it specifically attacks friends.
Trump also uses tariffs as a blunt instrument of personal revenge. If some foreign leader pisses him off? Tariff. If a nation gets critical treatment by idiots like Catturd or Tucker Carlson? Tariff. If Trump reads a random post on Truth Social that piques his interest? You guessed it: tariff. Tariffs fit so heavily into Trump’s economic worldview that he has seriously advocated a return to 19th century tax policy, where tariffs both protected American industry and comprised the majority of tax revenues.
The biggest problem here – and there are many – is that tariffs are quite possibly one of the worst ways of raising revenue that currently exists. Tariffs are not, contra Trump, paid by foreigners; they’re paid by American consumers who wish to purchase foreign goods. America is powerful economically because we are a trading nation. We export the specialty goods and services that nobody else can create, while importing cheap wares from more competitive markets abroad. Becoming an autarky, where imports are essentially forbidden and everything is produced at home, would impoverish generations of Americans while dramatically curtailing our global power and reach. Tariffs are inefficient when used broadly, don’t actually protect American jobs in any real way, and cost far more than they benefit.
On other economic issues, Trump is just as bad as the left. He is a profligate spender, failing to reduce the debt or deficit throughout his previous term in office. He failed to address the looming entitlements crisis, instead campaigning on nebulous promises to protect Social Security and Medicare. He massively increased government spending, even before the pandemic, to levels that had never been seen in American history. The tax bill pushed by Paul Ryan in his first term was largely positive, but Trump’s tax policies now are reckless and stupid. He seeks only to add new tax loopholes and keep rates the same, favoring particular constituent groups whose votes he seeks. Our economic state in relation to government spending and debt is fairly parlous at the moment; re-electing a thrice-bankrupted swindler to the office is not going to fix the problem.
Foreign Policy
Donald Trump, due to his immense characterological flaws, is uniquely ill-suited for the conduct of diplomacy. He falls hard for basic flattery, happily putting self-ingratiation over the national interest he was elected to uphold and pursue. He is far too soft on America’s dictatorial enemies, considering many of them personal friends. His praise for men like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un is disqualifying in a president. These people are our mortal foes, not folks we can be chummy with if they tickle our erogenous zones in just the right way. Trump is not an asset of these foreign governments, contrary to the tall tales of his domestic rivals, but he sure as hell is an easy mark. His lack of principle and consistency is especially dangerous in foreign affairs, as he can be swayed to positions that will redound to our foes’ benefit. There is nothing that makes him an opponent of China besides the fact that we have a trade deficit with it; if Beijing were buying more from America than we were from it, Trump would be lauding it as a model partner and great friend.
In that same vein, this makes him an incredibly unreliable ally. If I were Taiwan, I would stock up on weaponry and materiel as soon as possible, because American aid very well may not come in a Trump administration, depending on who has the principal’s ear last. His policies on Ukraine and Israel similarly leave much to be desired. He has repeatedly claimed that the defensive wars those nations find themselves in would never have happened had he been president, but he has just as often failed to articulate what he would actually do about them if re-elected. His inconstancy and rhetorical insanity occasionally help deter bad actors, but they far more commonly alienate allies and embolden enemies. Trump is much too reticent to use force abroad to stand up for our interests, allowing foes to strike with impunity until he eventually decides on a course of action. I praised Trump’s assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani, but this was the lone action taken after a laundry list of Iranian provocations and direct attacks. Those attacks could’ve been deterred or reduced had Iran been made to pay the price earlier.
He does not understand geopolitics as such – a complex, tangled web of relations, interests, and choices deeply influenced by geography and history – but simply conceives of international relations like it is a real estate deal: purely transactional, zero-sum, and comprised of one-off events. That makes him a very fair-weather friend and an easily manipulable counterparty. His instinct towards isolationism and retrenchment is not the ‘peace through strength’ approach of Reaganite ideology, but the myopia of a cowardly old man who much too often sees America as the problem overseas instead of as the solution. At this point, I don’t think our enemies are all that afraid of the man and know exactly what buttons to press to get what they want. And that endangers us all.
Domestic Issues
To preface this section, I want to be clear that social issues and the politics of things like abortion and popular culture are very much not what I vote on. I am a committed federalist and something of a civil libertarian, so I think that these issues are best decided and dealt with on the state, local, and, ideally, individual levels. The federal government should have very little to do with this sort of thing, instead focusing on truly national issues like economics, defense, and immigration.
That being said, Trump has many problematic ideas on these fronts. To start with, his approach to immigration is antithetical to what I believe. We agree that illegal immigration should be shut down, but disagree on how to handle the tens of millions of illegal aliens currently residing in the country. A mass deportation is not only unwieldy, it is likely to cause more harm than good, both economically and to the social fabric. Where I disagree with Trump most heavily is on legal immigration, which I think should be radically expanded and oriented towards skilled labor and those who ideologically align with American values of liberty. Trump, from all accounts, would restrict legal immigration were he to win next week. This is a terrible idea that will make us less globally competitive and will undercut one of our greatest advantages: our ability to pull the best and brightest from other nations and make them into patriotic and productive Americans. His demagoguery on this particular issue is also grotesque.
When it comes to the values that I hold dear as an American, Trump fails to earn my vote. He claims to be in favor of free speech and a free press, but simultaneously threatens to pull broadcast licenses for networks he deems unfavorable, seeks to criminalize flag burning, and wants to censor those he disagrees with. This is no different than the left on this issue, which is truly shameful. He desires to wield the power of government to punish his enemies and reward his friends, arguing that the other side is already doing it. This is the argumentative strategy of a kindergartner who is trying to get out of trouble, not something that we should countenance from our political leaders. The power of the state to harm individuals and dissenters should be reduced, not expanded. Unfortunately, neither candidate seeks to do that. It just happens to be more frustrating coming from the traditionally conservative side of the aisle.
Oh yeah, the guy also tried everything in his power – and a whole lot of stuff that wasn’t – to remain in office following his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden at the ballot box. He engaged in spurious lawfare that was so far removed from reality that not a single one of his cases had a snowball’s chance in Hell of being approved by the courts. His attempts to try and gin up false votes were despicable, his suborning of lies meant to undermine trust in the electoral system was abhorrent, and his actions (and inaction) during the Capitol riot on January 6 were appalling. I do not think Trump criminally fomented that riot, but he supported it, abetted it rhetorically, and failed to adequately respond to the very real danger his MAGA mob represented. Was that cold winter day nearly the death of American democracy? No. But it sure was a disgrace to our nation and our history. Trump deserves to be permanently exiled from American politics for his role in that snafu; at the very least, it disqualifies him from once again holding office.
The Team
Donald Trump has historically made a very big deal of saying that he only hired the best people for every job. He points to his bullshit reality TV show, The Apprentice, to prove that fact. But as anyone who was alive during the first Trump administration knows, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Trump’s instincts for hiring are about as good as Stevie Wonder’s eyesight. For positions that require Senate approval, Trump was hit or miss. He hired solid officials like Jim Mattis, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley for key national security posts, but he also picked out absolute nonentities like Rex Tillerson, Ben Carson, and Ryan Zinke for other Cabinet departments. Half of the good picks Trump made left or were fired after major disagreements with the president, including Attorney General Bill Barr, Homeland Security secretary John Kelly, and National Security Advisors HR McMaster and John Bolton. When unfettered by the need for Senate approval, Trump’s worst instincts came out. He hired absolute lunatics and clowns like Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, and Omarosa to key White House posts. These are the folks he felt most comfortable with and most often agreed with; they show Trump for who he really is. And they were an unmitigated disaster.
This time around, Trump may let those instincts off the leash even further, as he is unbound by the need for re-election and may very well have fewer competent people to choose from. The Trump orbit is replete with individuals who have no business being anywhere near government, from the verifiable nutjob Laura Loomer to his idiot sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Trump relishes in pissing off the people who hate him, and hiring these mental patients and mouth-breathing nincompoops is a great way to do it. Unfortunately, America just happens to be the collateral damage here. His vice president pick, JD Vance, is no loon, nor is he a fool. But he is a cynical populist who believes the idiot ideas he spouts, whereas his boss just goes with the prevailing winds. He is, in short, a charlatan. I guess that’s something the two have in common. Another thing they share is that neither deserves your vote.
Kamala Harris, Turd Sandwich
Character
Generally, the issues with personal character tend to indict Trump more than Harris in the popular imagination. But that is missing quite a bit. One does not need to be as disgraceful an individual as the former president – very few people are – to still have serious characterological problems that militate against earning the votes of the public. Kamala Harris is not a PT Barnum-esque figure who seeks to fool the electorate with false promises and claims that will be reneged upon within hours or days. Instead, she is a vacuous cipher, a black hole of charisma and ideas, and a genuinely bad politician. Harris has no real personality other than what she has imbibed from political consultants and focus groups. Her affect and accent shift with the crowd she is talking to. She is entirely a creation of media and the consultant class, with no real genuineness in her persona at all. There simply is no there there.
Her few moments of actual personality are indubitably off-putting and bizarre. When she has the chance to “be herself,” she stumbles over words, speaks utter nonsense, repeats canned lines and catchphrases, and cackles maniacally. She avoids situations in which she has to look like a real human being, as she does not have the ability to present as one. For instance, she skipped the Al Smith Dinner in New York City, which is a lighthearted roast meant to defuse the tensions of election season and humanize the candidates. Instead of appearing in person to make and take jokes – something her opponent excels at – she sent in a weird video lampooning the Catholics who put on the event and featuring an SNL character that nobody has thought about since the 2000 election. It was painfully unfunny and showed Harris as the nonentity that she is. She was the first major party nominee to bail on this event since Mondale in 1984. Make of that what you will.
Harris is an awful public speaker, which is odd for someone who has spent her entire career in politics trying to climb the greasy pole to high office. She makes a big deal of being a former prosecutor, but it is a wonder she ever won a single case with how badly she does on the stump. She struggles to get through her teleprompter speeches and looks absolutely pants-shittingly terrified when she has to ad-lib, as she did when her prompter briefly went out the other week. Politicians typically memorize their stump speeches after giving the same one a few times, but Harris seems constitutionally incapable of doing this. Preparation is not exactly her strong suit, as several aides have stated that she ignores briefing books and other preparatory materials; for those of us who have had the unfortunate task of watching her speak for the past 4 years, this makes perfect sense. As such, Harris has generally avoided any sort of neutral or hostile media, preferring to go on late night ‘comedy’ shows, favorable podcasts, and friendly interviews. In the early stages of her campaign, she was held entirely out of the media spotlight altogether, but this seemed to hurt her in the polls. Now, she’s been on something of a media blitz and it has decisively proven why her staff made the decisions they did to keep her quiet. Her gaffes, word salads, and inability to speak extemporaneously are not exactly positive indicators for her overall intelligence or capability to serve in the most powerful office in the world.
It would be bad enough if Harris was merely an empty vessel to be filled with progressive pablum and canned applause lines, but she is quite the fan of demagoguery and hyperbole herself. She chronically exaggerates the threat posed by her political rivals, especially Trump, who she has called a fascist. Given her lack of general knowledge, I would very much like to hear the vice president define that term. I have a feeling that her answer would be circuitous, irrational, and entirely divorced from fact and history. Her campaign has repeatedly lied about key issues, including the ones she has been running on for the past few months. On abortion, this is particularly galling. She has frequently claimed that a Georgia woman died from the fact that she couldn’t get an abortion, when this is completely untrue and has garnered pushback from the woman’s family. She has argued that Donald Trump would end American democracy if he wins, yet has blamed Trump himself for the rhetoric that led to the multiple assassination attempts against him. Her hyperbole knows no bounds and will surely continue if she is elected president. The American people deserve to hear the truth, not some facially absurd rhetoric that only serves naked political purposes. In this, Harris is no better than Trump and may, in fact, be worse.
Economics
Kamala Harris is, in her bones, a fan of progressive ideology. She ran on that message in 2019 when she was campaigning for president and has implemented it as vice president under Joe Biden. Her economics fit the bill perfectly. Harris is a fan of big government, seeking to enlarge the state at the expense of the people. Just like her Democratic predecessors, she wants the federal government to serve as parent, teacher, and decision-maker, removing individual agency and putting everything under the umbrella of the state. This has been exactly how the Biden-Harris administration has governed for the past several years, passing enormous pieces of bloated legislation that sent gobs of cash to favored interest groups without noticeably improving the economy or achieving the ends that those laws were intended to. Laws like the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act are hilariously named given their failure to ‘rescue’ America after Covid or reduce inflation. The former drove the inflationary spiral that was supposed to be undercut by the latter, but the IRA was in reality a climate change bill.
The American people have seen leftist economics in action over the past several years, and have found it consistently lacking. Instead of raising up the lowest rung of society in economic terms, the Biden-Harris administration made their cost-of-living skyrocket, undercut their ability to work where and how they please, and increased government intrusion into their daily lives. Profligate spending after the worst of the pandemic was over caused massive inflation, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1970s. And it didn’t even help anyone who actually needed it, instead serving as a slush fund for spendthrift blue states and funneling money to left-wing constituencies. Laws that should not have negatively impacted workers – like the bipartisan infrastructure bill – were written in a way to privilege corrupt unions and foreclose independent work. The addition of thousands of new IRS agents to supposedly audit the rich has only led to more intrusion into the taxes of the poor, who have always borne the brunt of IRS audits.
This is only the start, as the Harris campaign has promised even further spending and government interference in private transactions. Under a Harris administration, there would be more illegal attempts at student debt ‘forgiveness’ (read: transference), more regulatory imposition on independent businesses and freelancers, and more excessive, inflationary spending. Of course, Harris will say that “if the rich only pay their fair share,” we can afford all of these shiny baubles. This is a lie; the wealthiest Americans already pay the vast majority of taxes and further taxing them simply disincentivizes investment that helps all Americans through cheaper products and higher purchasing power. She claims that she will build millions of new homes through government intervention, but this is going to be a total boondoggle. Instead of making it easier for private builders to increase housing inventory, she wants the government to do it directly. That’s never gone wrong, right? It’s not like government housing projects are notorious for their extremely inefficient allocation of capital and high level of danger. Oh, wait.
If you thought that the Biden economy was bad for everything but the stock market, just wait until you see how his vice president messes things up. I would invest in some recession-proof industries like booze, sex, and firearms if I were you.
Foreign Policy
Foreign affairs are easily the most problematic part of the Harris candidacy. For starters, she’s said over and over again that she sees no difference between herself and President Biden on the issues. For anyone who cares about American power abroad or the fate of our allies, this is a blaringly loud warning klaxon. The Biden legacy on foreign policy is easily the worst in my lifetime and perhaps the worst since the end of the Second World War. He has presided over a dramatic increase in the confidence of our enemies, several existential attacks against our friends, the most chaotic and destructive American withdrawal from conflict since the helicopters flew away from Saigon in 1975, and a massive rise in global pandemonium. The Biden-Harris team has abandoned our responsibilities in Afghanistan, prevented potential victory in Ukraine by slow-walking military aid, conciliated the Chinese Communist Party, and done everything in its power to forestall Israeli action to dismantle the Iranian Axis of Resistance. It has undermined our military readiness, failed to restore deterrence after direct attacks on American interests and personnel, and privileged diplomacy above all, making us look like a laughingstock when it inevitably fails. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Kamala would be more of the same, but somehow even worse. She has less than zero foreign policy experience, focusing purely on domestic issues in her campaign and during her time in the Senate. In her stint as vice president, a time when most politicians live and breathe foreign affairs, she has failed miserably on the subject. Does anyone remember how she “studied the maps” and knew that Israel simply could not go into Rafah to destroy Hamas? Well, some of us remember. And we know that Israel was able to safely evacuate over a million Gazan civilians from the area, map and degrade the immense Hamas tunnel network running under the border to Egypt, capture the key Philadephi Corridor, and, just recently, killed Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s archterrorist mastermind, in a building in Rafah itself. But sure, she studied those maps damn hard. Honestly, that whole kerfuffle makes me believe that Kamala Harris very well may be illiterate. Either that, or she is determined to save the Iranian terror network from just reprisals by our allies in Jerusalem.
Even on the one issue where she touts her success, the war in Ukraine, Harris policy would be bad. The Biden team claims it has helped Ukraine avoid total defeat by Russia, which is true in a manner of speaking. Indeed, American military aid has stopped Moscow from fully overrunning the country, but it has done nothing more than string along the Ukrainians and force them into painful attritional warfare that they are unfortunately destined to lose against a far larger enemy. Harris will push for weapons deliveries that come months or years too late, put counterproductive conditions on that aid, and somehow blame Republicans for the inevitable issues that arise with this fatally flawed strategy. The only way that Ukraine can get an acceptable peace out of this horrific conflict is to ensure they are given tons of weapons very quickly and are allowed to use them against Russia itself. Harris has shown no willingness to countenance this approach, preferring to drag the war out while talking a big game. All this will do in the end is allow Moscow to entrench itself in eastern Ukraine and further cement its relations with the Axis of Autocracies that seek our undoing.
On Israel, she is terrible. She has repeatedly claimed that Israel is killing too many innocent Palestinians, taking the fountain of bullshit spewed by the Hamas Health Ministry as the gospel truth, while ignoring the very real evidence shown by our ally. She has stated that there must be an immediate ceasefire, which would allow Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iranian mullahcracy to survive and live to murder Jews another day. She has excused the vast urban and campus antisemitism – funded by Iran and Qatar, no less – and said that the protestors pushing blood libels against the Jewish state “have a point.” She has tacitly accepted the ridiculous genocide smear at face value, pushed Israel to make unilateral concessions to murderous terrorists, and avoided the United Nations’ role in the continued Palestinian militancy. Despite saying that Iran is our greatest foreign threat, she has pushed policies that only aid Iran in its quest for a nuclear weapon with which to destroy Israel outright.
Let’s dwell for a moment on that statement, made to 60 Minutes, that Iran is our primary antagonist. It is batshit lunacy that shows exactly how little Harris knows about geopolitics. Tehran is our enemy, as I have written over and over again. But it pales in comparison to Beijing, not only in its global aims, but in its ability to harm our interests and kill our citizens. China is the paramount threat to American world status in the 21st century – something patently obvious to anyone with a functioning prefrontal cortex. Harris and her advisors (more on which in a bit) are happy to consider China a mere ‘competitor’ who we can work with on issues like climate change. This is so aggressively stupid that I don’t know where to start. Xi Jinping and his communist lackeys have made it clear that they seek to destroy the US-led world order and replace it with something far worse for our interests and the freedom of sovereign nations everywhere to live in peace. But hey, they may make some random useless paper promises on greenhouse gases that they’ll surely never live up to.
That brings us to another issue: the myopic and ludicrous prioritization of climate change garbage in international relations. Even if you think climate change is the biggest crisis facing the world today – and if you do, I’d suggest a lobotomy – you would be an absolute dolt to believe that any sort of international agreement on the issue is remotely enforceable, meaningful, or helpful. All these paper promises do is undermine American energy production, make regular citizens poorer, and hamstring us in the contest for 21st-century world supremacy. China may slap its John Hancock on paper saying they’ll reduce emissions, but if you actually believe them, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Climate change is something that humanity will adapt to and overcome, but that is only going to happen if we stop punching ourselves repeatedly in the proverbial nuts to prove our progressive bona fides.
In this and so many other things, the Harris administration would be far too conciliatory to the hive of scum and villainy that is the ‘international community.’ As we have seen over the past few years, that vaunted body of world opinion is worth less than a sack of wet shit. It is dominated by antisemitism, anti-Americanism, pro-authoritarianism, and intractable corruption. Sure, you may get some plaudits at the shitshow that is the UN General Assembly or get invited to some fancy European cocktail parties, but the cost is abrogating American sovereignty and interests abroad. And right now, it looks like Kamala is just about to whip out her credit card.
Domestic Issues
My disclaimer above for this section still applies for Harris. Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk turkey.
Kamala Harris is, was, and always will be a San Francisco progressive on social issues. She is radical on abortion, crime, and gender ideology – three issues that are becoming increasingly important to the broader electorate. On abortion, Democrats are currently winning the political battle after the correct Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade and returning the issue back to the states where it rightly belongs. Republicans have pushed very strong pro-life measures in states across the country, most of which are out of step with voters in their locales. Democrats have been able to campaign on restoring the previous status quo, but this is not going to be the case forever. At some point, Harris’s radicalism on abortion – she seeks no limitation on gestational age, pushes for abortion regardless of rationale, and wants no opt-outs for religious conscience – will be an issue with the public at large.
With respect to crime and transgender issues, the chickens are coming home to roost far sooner. Despite her record as a prosecutor and California attorney general, Harris has been very soft on crime since she reached the national stage. As the party’s candidate for vice president in 2020, Harris promoted a bail fund for violent rioters and criminals arrested during the George Floyd riots. She has jumped on every potential police brutality or racism scandal, regardless of evidence, including the laughable Jussie Smollett hoax and the legal shooting of the armed and aggressive Jacob Blake in Wisconsin. Her ideas, as expressed in her failed 2019 presidential campaign, were far outside of the mainstream. She has praised the moronic ‘Defund the Police’ movement, advocated for de-carceral policies that would release violent felons from prison, and – yes, this is true – pushed for taxpayer-funded gender surgeries on federal inmates and immigration detainees.
On transgender issues, Harris is a far leftist. The Biden-Harris administration has pushed for Title IX changes that would allow natal males to play women’s and girls’ sports, pressured medical groups to alter care guidelines so as to allow for gender surgeries for minors, and promoted laws that allow schools to lie to parents about the gender identities of their children. This may not seem like a major issue, but it has clear resonance and a wide reach, as many Americans are parents.
What is quite obviously a major campaign issue, however, is illegal immigration, something Harris is just as bad on. During her time as vice president, Harris was tasked with staunching the flow of illicit migrants across the southern border. She says she was investigating “root causes,” but it doesn’t matter how she tries to spin it, the truth is clear: she was total crap at the job. Since taking office, the flow of illegal immigrants has been staggering, allowing millions of unvetted people, including criminals, into the country. The legal immigration system itself was gamed, granting hundreds of thousands of otherwise illegal migrants some form of temporary legal status. She has campaigned on regularizing millions of illegal immigrants who currently reside in the United States, has argued against deportations, and claims that the Biden-Harris administration has been great on the issue since day 1. As for the latter, nothing could be further from the truth.
In the legal realm, Harris is perhaps at her most extreme. She wants to pass what she calls Supreme Court ‘reform’, but what is, in actuality, court packing by another name. Harris supports term limits on justices – which would require a constitutional amendment – so as to “depoliticize” the Court. But the term limits scheme is itself politicizing the Court, as it would remove three of nine sitting justices, all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents and are staunch legal opponents of the progressive regime. To me, this policy is in and of itself disqualifying. It seeks to upend the constitutional order solely for partisan gain. And Harris wouldn’t stop there in her anti-constitutional ambition. She had pushed for mandatory gun buybacks, contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the Second Amendment; she has sought to criminalize so-called ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’, both of which are protected speech under the First Amendment; she has said outright that the Constitution is a barrier to policy that can be ignored for the greater good. These are fundamentally anti-American positions that have no place being promoted by the president of the United States. And that’s why Kamala Harris should never sit behind the Resolute Desk.
The Team
The Harris campaign and its potential instantiation in the executive branch is not problematic because it is full of insane conspiracy nuts who belong nowhere near government. On the contrary, the administration would be staffed with longtime Democratic figures, particularly from the movement’s progressive wing and the group collectively known as Obamaworld – the people who filled out the 44th president’s administration and did the same for his third term, I mean, Biden’s term. This is precisely the problem. The three Democratic administrations this century have been largely the same in terms of personnel, with the most successful figures rolling off at every turn of the wheel. That means the people running the show in a Harris administration would be retreads who are finally getting their shot at the big time; the fact that this would be the fourth administration staffed by this same group means they’d really be scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time Harris is inaugurated.
On the progressive front, Kamala’s most trusted advisors, those who ran her 2019 campaign into the ground, are aggressive and principled in their radicalism. They will push her to do more to make the administration as far left as possible, from climate change claptrap and massive spending bills to legalizing illegal migrants and calling Israel a genocidal apartheid state. Her probable National Security Advisor, Philip Gordon, was a key backer of the Iran nuclear deal and has written op-eds that promote that evil regime’s propaganda, besides being weak on other enemies like Russia and China. Her embrace of the DEI ideology means that she will privilege race, sex, and sexual orientation over competence, something which should frighten anyone who would prefer a useful government. And all of this comes back to the candidate herself, whose career has been made almost exclusively by her physical characteristics; recall that she was picked by Joe Biden because she was a black woman. Just as she is unfit for the job, her team would be no better. And that shouldn’t earn your vote.
Elections Are Non-Binary
One of these two jackasses – the Giant Douche or the Turd Sandwich – will become the next president of the United States. That is inevitable in our electoral system as currently constituted. We live in a republic in which a first-past-the-post system rules the day. That privileges the two major parties and they are the ones who left us in the present mess. There are, of course, various third parties that compete for the votes of the American people, but these groups are even messier and more flawed than the Democrats and Republicans. There is a reason why no third-party candidate has received any electoral votes since the segregationist George Wallace won five states in 1968; they simply cannot put up anyone worth voting for in large numbers.
But do not despair, dear reader: despite this inevitability, you do not need to vote for either of these totally unfit losers! In fact, you don’t need to vote at all if you don’t want to!
We are blessed to live in the freest country on the planet, which means that nobody can force you into participating in electoral politics if you don’t want to. Realistically, lack of political interest among large percentages of the population can signal social and economic stability. In spite of what you see on social media, most Americans don’t live and breathe politics; they’re simply happy to live their lives, build their families, work in their chosen careers, and enjoy their hobbies. Living one’s life outside politics is probably a far healthier choice, so don’t let yourself be bullied by those of us who have had our brains poisoned by the political realm. You can vote for candidates in every election, some elections, or none at all. You can vote for either major party, a third party, write in a choice, or select nobody at all. Elections aren’t a binary choice between two possibilities, even if that is realistically what the outcome will end up being. There is no need for you personally to ratify that end result.
Politics isn’t about being on the winning side; it’s about using your individual conscience and power for rational thought to make a selection that you are proud of. It isn’t a team sport like football or baseball. You don’t owe your support to a specific party or politician. If a candidate has not actively earned your vote, they do not deserve to get it. If you do not feel in your heart, gut, and mind that a particular candidate represents your interests in a fashion that you are happy with, don’t vote for them. You shouldn’t be a cheap date on something so critically important to the civic fabric of our shared homeland. Rabid partisans on social media will claim that this is cowardly, that it means you are throwing your vote away or not participating properly in the process, and that you are voting for the other major candidate if you don’t vote for their personal preference, dooming the nation in the process.
I have two words for these people: fuck off.
On that note, let’s end this overlong polemic with some positivity: who actually has earned my vote. This year, I’ll be writing in two of my favorite politicians for president and vice president: Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, respectively. I thought long and hard about this choice, just barely cutting a few honorable mentions over the past month or two (sorry, former Wisconsin representative Mike Gallagher and perennial favorite/my 2020 write-in Condoleezza Rice). I chose these two politicians as worthy of my vote for a few reasons.
First, both are serious men who take politics seriously. They do not engage in rampant hyperbole, do not vilify their opponents unnecessarily, and do not have the severe character flaws of Trump or Harris. They are experienced, conservative politicians who complement one another on the biggest issues I see facing the country over the coming years: economics and foreign policy. Youngkin is a wildly successful businessman who, unlike the scion of the Republican Party, hasn’t run a casino into bankruptcy. (Seriously, how the hell does someone go broke running a goddamn casino?!) He knows economic policy and has executive experience running one of America’s most complicated states. Cotton is a decorated military veteran (one who actually saw combat, unlike Harris’s doofus of a running mate, Tim Walz) and has been easily the best foreign policy voice in the Senate for the past 5-plus years. Together, they would be a formidable team to tackle the challenges and crises that will surely arise between January 20, 2025 and January 20, 2029.
Both men are excellent public speakers who can keep their cool under intense aggressive questioning by biased members of the press. They can be combative in these moments, pushing back with gusto against false narratives and misleading statements, but do so without being annoying or off-putting. Unlike the people at the top of the two major party tickets, they say what they mean and mean what they say. They are articulate and intelligent, but are able to speak to the common man in a manner he can understand and relate to. They each have sterling reputations in terms of character and would treat their oaths of office with the gravity they deserve. Neither would be a threat to the American constitutional order. They would enforce the laws on the books as written and follow the decisions of courts, even when they went against their preferred outcomes.
They would not tolerate or countenance government overreach either into the lives of individuals or past the remit of the federal bureaucracy. They argue for a smaller, more limited federal government in line with its proper constitutional role and our federalist tradition. They do not seek to use the power of the state to reward friends and punish enemies, bucking the trend that has been extant since the Obama years. They would push back against the bloat that has turned the federal government into a true Hobbesian Leviathan, something that is desperately needed in Washington these days. Cotton and Youngkin are both strong figures who would be able and willing to handle the major crises that will characterize the latter half of the 2020s, ranging from the wars that currently rage across the globe and a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan to the looming entitlements cliff and domestic social unrest.
They are also patriotic Americans who love this country and its glorious history. That wouldn’t always be a deciding factor for me, but 2026 sees America’s semiquincentennial – our 250th anniversary as a nation. It is imperative that our leaders properly mark that special occasion, and a Cotton/Youngkin administration would do so with aplomb. We have a wonderful opportunity to reclaim America’s past from those who would denigrate it as evil, racist, and genocidal; Harris would buy into those false narratives, while Trump would fumble the opportunity as only he knows how to do. Neither are fit for duty, which is why I won’t be voting for them. Instead, let’s sign up for a better tomorrow, one where America is the strong nation that it must be to face down our rivals.
Cotton/Youngkin ’24: At Least We’re Not Those Other Guys.
Wow, you’ve made it to the end! Congratulations. You won’t be receiving a prize. In fact, given the results of next week’s election, you’ll receive a punishment. Regardless of who wins – Trump the Giant Douche or Harris the Turd Sandwich – we all lose. We’re in for some shit the next four years. But remember, America is bigger than any one politician, no matter how shitty they are. I believe in the American people and our ability to overcome challenges together.
But seriously, guys, please pick candidates who don’t suck ass next time. Thanks in advance!