A friend of mine had a Trump sign on his lawn in St. Paul, possibly as confrontational as planting a Harris sign outside a Texas oil field. Knowing the fellow as I do the Trump sign didn’t surprise me. I wondered, as I drove by it for the first time, how long it would last.
Not long.
The guy emailed me recently and told me the sign had been taken. It was up for a few days before it was snatched from in front of his home on a leafy block in the middle of Highland Park.
St. Paul is certainly not Trump country.
But wait. He just installed a new Trump sign and as of this moment it still survives in a sea of Harris signs, many of them Andy Warhol-like colorful paintings of her face.
The most important presidential election in my lifetime features the two most triggering characters imaginable. You could drag a net across this country and not capture two souls more riveting and yet so seemingly ill-suited than Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, for completely different reasons.
Trump’s obsequious mouthpieces have repeatedly tried to get him to take back the threat that he would round up his enemies if elected. He has not. What would he do? Off to the gulag? Something might have happened to him when he was 7 or 8, something at the age of reason, that left him darkened to humility, empathy and self-deprecation. He is not whole. He apparently has a fondness for dictators. If you don’t kiss his ring you are an enemy.
Trump gets a few things right. Men shouldn’t play on women’s sports teams. Our country should have consequential borders. Fossil fuels remain crucial, not to be despised in the longing for magical carbon net zero. And, as Trump knows, hurricanes have pounded Florida’s shores since the beginning of time, with or without the hysterical hectoring of the climate change crowd.
Harris, the youngster in the race at 60, was a player in the coup that dumped Joe Biden. She was appointed to run for president. She didn’t win the spot with votes. She is a skilled shape-shifter on any policy that comes her way. But what does she stand for? Joy doesn’t pay the bills or chip away at the nation’s dangerously high debt.
She can’t speak to issues and has not. If her teleprompter freezes up, she sounds like a Miss Teenage America pageant contestant trying to describe the firing order of an eight-cylinder engine.
Harris told the brain trust on “The View’’ that there is nothing she would change about the last four years. Really? And this is the woman who says “we will not go back.’’
Guess not. We’ll just dog paddle.
Trump can’t be told a thing, by anybody. People who worked for him the first time around do not have kind words for the fellow. Harris changes her mind so often that it is reasonable to suspect that her handlers are running the show and tell her everything. But who are they?
If we didn’t have a looming election we could be seeking a crucial answer. Who is running this country?
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The country deserves more and neither party cared about us, neither party delivered a strong, intelligent, upstanding stalwart who deserved our trust.
We have been taken for granted. Our biggest challenge come Nov. 6 will be to carry on and get along, no matter who wins.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at [email protected]. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic’’ podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
