Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago press conference last week, ostensibly convened to discuss his debate plans. The first few sentences set the tone: “I think that our country is right now in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in, from an economic standpoint, from a safety standpoint. Both gangs on the street and frankly gangs outside of our country in the form of other countries that are frankly very powerful” — and so on for several more minutes.
Doomsday America is of course a familiar Trump theme, jarringly blared in his inaugural address about “American carnage” (“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation”). Earlier this week his X feed (yes, I am a glutton for punishment) reprised this leitmotif of 2017: “Our economy is shattered. Our border has been erased. We’re a nation in decline.”
For contrast, I’ve listened to some of Vice President Kamala Harris’s speeches. ...
...her core rhetoric: “We are all here because we love our country, right? And we believe in our foundational principles, we believe in freedom."
In other words: The world isn’t falling apart...
Where would you rather live? In Trump’s bleak dystopia or in Harris’s world?
