Todd Rado ’26
Opinions Editor
If you are a ride-or-die Trump-voter, I fear this article isn’t for you. Simply turn the page, or if you’re one of our online readers, continue celebrating your victory on X with Musk, likely skipping up and down like a five year old allowed to stay up twenty extra minutes past their bedtime. The following is instead an open letter to those who are reeling from the results, and lamenting the blood and ruined lives that will come of the Trump presidency, simultaneously terrified by the concept of losing rights, and tempted to blame for these results those who showed up for Stein or (my personal favorite) Claudia De la Cruz, or the many who didn’t show up for Democrats at all due to their mishandling of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, or general apathy towards the campaign/misogyny/what have you. To you, there is an important fact to acknowledge at present: Trump will be evil. Those who voted for him made a bad, selfish call. The deportations, rollouts, and dehumanization that defines the Trump campaign makes both him and his supporters a bastion of weird, populist hate, and life for the next four years will be demonstrably worse. People will suffer and die as a result of this. Fear and anger is the correct thing to be feeling, and you’re not alone in that. That being said, Kamala winning would have been an equally miserable outcome for everyone — arguably even worse, in the long-term — and you should find both horror and comfort in that the degree of separation between Trump and Harris is far less than it would seem, and the fault of that does not lie on the way anyone voted (or didn’t). Exploring the what if of a Kamala policy agenda — and her electoral strategy — to demonstrate this is an order.
First, a quick breakdown of Harris’ campaign, issue-per-issue. The Harris campaign did not, and does not, care about the working class. The choice of Walz for Vice president was seemingly one made to appease progressives, but Harris quickly made it clear she had no intention of walking the walk. Their lack of desire to break from Biden sent a clear and evident message that there was no intention of being any different for workers. Let us not forget, for example, how Biden backstabbed railroad workers during their bid for increased paid sick leave, leaving them in the dust. Her campaign issues do include a number of minor promises of tax cuts to the middle class, but nothing to substantially make working people’s lives better. This failure to break with Biden’s anti-humanitarian policies is a significant part of why Walz appeared so desperately out of his element during the Vice-Presidential debate. Instead of the masculine, progressive sweetheart persona Walz was supposed to embody, due to the pressure of the campaign to race to the right and stick close to Biden, he appeared far more like he was cosplaying Hakeem Jeffries.
“But Harris wouldn’t have been a fascist, unlike Trump!” Her own admission tells a different story. In 2019, she described Trump’s wall as a “medieval vanity project”. During the course of her campaign, however, she went all in on Trump’s immigration panic rhetoric, patting herself on the back for her continued “prosecution of international gangs”, and criticizing how, actually, Democrats would have loved to crack down on the border, but Trump encouraged Republicans to not pass a bipartisan bill. This slow crawl to the right is not something that can be tracked across all of her policy positions, from gun control to police brutality and fracking. Further, Harris would be as bad as Gaza as would Trump, if her campaign refusing to let a Palestinian speak at the DNC — while letting an Israeli speak — tells us anything. Let Kamala speak for herself on this issue: “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7…At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.” Israel’s suffering is because of terrorism, a clear cause and origin, but Palestine’s? Sounds more like a natural disaster to me. Let’s not also forget how the Harris campaign sent Bill Clinton to Dearborn like the plague onto Egypt, to effectively sales-pitch total Israeli domination to a Muslim-majority district. The only effective difference between the Kamala campaign and the Trump campaign on this issue is how overtly they’re willing to say that some people aren’t really people. Finally, she enthusiastically allied with warhawk Liz Cheney to deliver a muddled “country over party” message, and promised to have one Republican in cabinet. By all accounts, all there would be to expect from Kamala is four years of posturing to the right, but by objective measure, a slightly more “civilized”, n-1 of Trump.
Trump, in short, presented an easily exploitable boogeyman to the Harris campaign, as it did to the Clinton campaign. There is no genuine need to promise a particularly appealing policy agenda if you can simply run off of how bad the other campaign is. Unfortunately, when you align all of your political positions with your opponent, people are simply going to vote for your opponent, and your opponent immediately looks better and more consistent than you. Kamala’s inability to stand for something was, poetically but depressingly, the reason she fell. The “vote blue no matter who” strategy failed in 2016, and it failed again. If Harris won, this strategy would have continued, and Harris’ 2028 campaign would look even chillingly more like Trump’s 2024 campaign. The notion of Kamala being anything more than a right-wing grifter will be a myth born of nostalgia and lament, but it is important to keep in perspective that it is not true. Will the Democrats learn to respond to public pressure, and will this trend change? Unlikely, short of a miracle or mass riot. Your life gets worse, and you lose rights, either way. No matter what, this election marked a downward slope for the American Empire, and the only question either campaign settled was how fast. Real, upwards change is never going to come from a ballot. It instead comes from people willing to put pressure in the right places, working to never let people like either Trump or Harris forget that they should be scared of that pressure, because of what it could mean for them and the systems they hold dear should they ignore it. The only form of politics that has ever mattered, Democrat or Republican, is the politics of dissent and resistance. And if we fight hard enough, we have the smallest of hopes that our futures won’t be so bad.
Featured image courtesy of Google Images
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