America, don’t vote Trump

 Voters in the United States of America head to the poll Tuesday, 5th November, to elect the 47th president in the country’s nearly 250-year nationhood. Their options are down to a straight choice between Vice-President Kamala Harris, who bids on Democratic ticket to make history as the first female commander-in-chief of the world’s most influential country, and former President Donald Trump, the 45th president who aims on Republican ticket to retake the reins he lost in the 2020 election to incumbent President Joe Biden. If he gets his way, he will be the second defeated president in all U.S. history to regain the office, following after Grover Cleveland – the first to be elected president after the 1885 American civil war. Cleveland, a Democrat, was the 22nd president and he returned for a second term as 24th president four years after he initially lost the White House.

Under the U.S. electoral system, election day climaxes voters’ exercise of their franchise that has been underway for some weeks through early voting and mail-in balloting, and in which more than 60million people were reported to have cast their ballot already. The race for the White House has been dead heated between Harris and Trump, who opinion polling showed to be locked in a knife-edge tie that has seen the Democrat’s early bump over her Republican rival when she joined the fray in July shrinking steadily since late September. Projections have been a nail biter across swing states that will decide who takes the saddle and at the last count, many polls showed single digit disparities between the two contenders, meaning the election is effectively a toss. 

With the American electorate composed in large part of stock Democratic and Republican voters, the two candidates made their last concerted pitches for undecided voters more than a week ahead of the poll and devoted the remaining time before election day to mobilising swing states. Trump made his final pitch at a massive rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, penultimate Sunday night, where he and his supporters plied extreme arguments of hate and racial bile. Speeches at the rally were targeted at driving a huge Trump base turnout and activate voters who don’t normally cast ballots but who agree with his hardline politics, even if moderate voters were scared off. “The United States is an occupied country,” Trump said, as he echoed his long-standing threat to launch the biggest mass deportation of aliens in U.S. history if he becomes president again. Supporting speakers were even more extreme: one called Harris the “antichrist (and) the devil,” while others lashed out at “illegals” and homeless people. A comedian described the Latino populated U.S. territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

Harris made her own closing arguments, Tuesday, on the the grassy expanse behind the south lawn of the White House in Washington – same spot where Trump as president held a rally on 6th January, 2021 and told his supporters to “fight like hell” or they would not have a country anymore, following which a mob of insurrectionists smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Biden’s election victory as prescribed by the American constitution. Using the White House South Portico as backdrop, the Democratic torchbearer invoked her Republican rival’s 2021 act to highlight the danger ahead if he wins the election. “We know who Donald Trump is. He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election, an election that he knew he lost,” Harris said. “This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better. This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power. It doesn’t have to be this way,” she added.

“Harris faces an uphill task averting the doomsday she forewarned about, but it is not an impossible task.”

Harris faces an uphill task averting the doomsday she forewarned about, but it is not an impossible task. Opinion polling showed that a greater number of American voters trust Trump more to handle matters that are central to their daily existence like the economy and security, as well as the touchy issue of immigration. While Harris promises to be a change agent, her greatest burden is that she serves – actually, is number two – in the Biden administration that is unpopular because of inflationary pressures in the economy that has seen a typical American household reportedly spending one thousand, one hundred and twenty dollars more per month to buy same goods and services as in January 2021 when Biden assumed the presidency. This has left the Democratic torchbearer struggling to convince voters she’s got the best plans to improve their lives, and millions of American nursing a nostalgia for the more affordable economy of the Trump era.

The vice-president argued at her Washington rally that whereas Trump would spend the next four years wielding unaccountable power against what he had called “the enemy from within,” she would bring down grocery prices, make it easier for Americans to pay for homes and mortgages, cap health care costs and restore nationwide abortion rights to women. Only that her pitch rang somewhat hollow against Trump’s strong economic appeal, his demagoguery notwithstanding. “I’d like to begin by asking a very simple question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” he asked the crowd at his New York rally. “I’m here today with a message of hope for all Americans: With your vote in this election, I will end inflation, stop the invasion of criminals coming into our country, and bring back the American dream. If Kamala Harris gets four more years (notice a deliberate distortion of facts, as if the Biden administration is Harris’s first term), our economy can never recover. If I win, we will quickly build the greatest economy in the history of world,” he added.

But America mustn’t make the mistake of returning Trump to the White House. Not only is he not good for his own country, he is bad news for other countries of the world, especially countries in Africa. During his first term in power, he was reported labelling African nations and the southern American states of Haiti and El Salvador “shithole countries.” With his MAGA nationalism, he was never favourably disposed to looking out for other countries as America is historically reputed to do, and he has gotten more hardened in his xenophobic fervour during his years out of power that he has been plotting a return. Even America’s close allies and fellow developed nations view the prospect of his return to the White House with great trepidation. Besides, Trump is an aberration in his own political setting: he is a strongman in a political system that vests greater authority in public will. One-time Trump White House chief of staff, John Kelly, recently said his ex-boss fitted the definition of a fascist and occasionally remarked that Adolf Hitler “did some good things.” That is not what America is known for, and it shouldn’t change now.

Should Trump win the 5th November poll, it will be legitimate to ask how things have gone so awfully wrong with the U.S. that voters opted for a convicted felon, serially indicted criminal suspect, twice impeached ex-president, confirmed sponsor of insurrectionists and an unabashedly fascistically inclined power actor to fill the highest office in the country and arguably the most powerful position in the world.

The emergence of a U.S. president, of course, hinges on not just the popular will but an electoral college of voters pooled from the country’s 50 states and Washington, DC. The states have respective number of electors allotted them based on their populations. So, what Americans are really voting for at the poll are state electors, who will subsequently vote the president on their behalf.

But Harris has a path to netting the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency out the 538 electoral college votes up for grabs. California, her home state, has 54 votes this year; and she is neck and neck with Trump in critical swing states like Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin. She also has the gender bloc advantage that could help her break the hardest ceiling in U.S. politics if women show up in their overwhelming numbers to pick the first woman president of that country.

The choice before U.S. voters in the 2024 presidential election is between making history and ennobling infamy. America, choose wisely.