- Two candidates from two major parties. Both young(ish), both with previous experience in business and government.
- Two parties who duke it out, on the public stage, but who don’t resort to ad hominem or attacks on the family of the other candidate.
- A government -- a civil service -- that is neutral. Where public expressions of political leanings are frowned upon.
- A Media that follows both campaigns closely, questions and criticises both.
- A voting system that is: (1) Paper-based only -- no electronic voting (2) On Voting day only -- no early postal voting (3) Auditable (4) Requires ID.
How we doing? Against that ideal?
Answer: Very badly. Not a single one of the above criteria is met. Not. A. Single. One.
The biggest thing in the current US campaign is that the whole of the media -- the Mainstream Media, aka “legacy media” -- are on the side of Kamala Harris. The whole of that media are violently anti Donald Trump, right up to and including having “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
And the government, which some (not me) call the “Deep State”, are clearly anti-Trump as well. We know this from the actions of the FBI in the the Russian Collusion Hoax, dreamt up by Hillary Clinton after her 2016 election loss. And we know it from the fact that, in October 2020 during that election campaign, 51 former heads of Intelligence Agencies, of the FBI, the CIA, the DOHS, signed on to a letter claiming that the “Hunter Biden Laptop” story was likely Russian Misinformation, when we know -- and they had to have known then -- that it was indeed Hunter’s laptop and that its contents were very damaging to Joe Biden’s candidacy.
In other words, it’s hardly a fair fight. It’s Trump against the world. Trump against not just Harris, but also the media. And the government and its vexatious lawfare against him, via various lawsuits, that even people on the left -- like Fareed Zakaria of CNN --admit are politically motivated.
It is no exaggeration to say that it’s “Trump against the world”.
I mean: even against a sniper’s bullet! (Which, let’s note here, has been memory-holed by the media. Reflects too well on Trump, dontcha know...).
And yet. And yet. The polls show that it’s a close-run thing. That Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are running neck and neck. If the media were right -- that Kamala is wonderful and Trump a “danger to democracy” -- you’d expect that the polls would show Kamala surging ahead. The fact that she’s not is a measure of just how bad a candidate she is. And -- perhaps hopefully -- that the public is not fooled by the media bias. After all, it was only yesterday that she was universally seen as a failure of a Veep. And that her time as DA of San Francisco and AG of California were failures. As Tulsi Gabbard savaged her during the 2020 debates.
On the candidate experience thing: Trump is an experienced business man. Some criticise him for being a “just a millionaire who became a billionaire”. Well, it’s not that easy to become a billionaire even starting with millions. Only one in 34,000 turns millions to Billions.
Trump inherited around $47 million, which he’s grown to around $10 Billion. That’s 39% compound growth, well in excess of the S&P, well in excess of the best-performing Funds. It doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t happen without serious business smarts. And he now has the government executive experience of one term as US president. His running mate, J.D. Vance, founded and ran a technology company after serving in the US Marines -- including in Iraq -- and gaining a Yale law degree, all starting as a hillbilly boy. On the other side, neither Kamala Harris, nor her running mate Tim Walz has any experience in business at all. Zero.
My own experience in self-owned business -- as well as in government and corporate jobs -- taught me that owning and running your own business is one of the biggest teachers of the reality of life that there is.
Trump and Vance have it. Harris and Walz don’t.
I live in Hong Kong so I’m not directly affected by US elections. But I do follow them closely. Like most folks around the world. Because US elections do affect the rest of the world. US elections have consequences.
My take is that it would be best for the United States and best for the world if Trump won.
I’ll do a separate post on why I think that. It’s not that I’m a crazy Trump fan-boy. Or that I hate Kamala because she’s a “Woman of Colour”. Neither of these. But one is bad and one is not quite so bad. That’s where I’d put it. The least bad candidate is Trump. Which is probably rather unfair to him. After all, his first presidency is now looked back on with some nostalgia: a time of low inflation, good wage growth and peace in the world.
Peace, baby.
