Twenty-Eight Reasons to Vote for Kamala Harris

1. The overwhelming majority of Trump’s cabinet were straight, white, older Christian men. His Vice-President, Mike Pence (who now disowns Trump), was one. Of Trump’s twenty-two other Cabinet members, all were non-Hispanic white men except for two women (Gina Haspel and Jovita Carranza) and one Black man (Ben Carson). Two are reported to be Jewish or of Jewish descent.

This narrow selection is not just an affront to diversity, inclusion and “fair representation,” whatever that means. It’s a fundamental matter of talent. Today, in 2024, white Christians represent only 43% of the US population. So white, male Christians represent less than 22%.

Do you want a quarterback who’ll leave 78% of the team’s talent on the bench? Our difficult times demand the very best, chosen without fear of favor from our entire population. Kamala Harris reflects our best, and, given these odds, her Cabinet will be far better than Trump’s.

2. President Joe Biden’s current cabinet is far better than Trump’s because it looks much more like America. Of his 25 Cabinet members besides now-VP Harris, twelve are women, and only nine are non-Hispanic white men. Of those, four are Jewish or of Jewish descent, two are Catholic, and one (Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg) is openly gay. Biden’s Cabinet also includes: three Black women, two Black men, three people of Hispanic descent, two women of Asian descent, and the first-ever woman of Native American descent (Transportation Secretary Deb Haaland). Crucially, both Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense (Lloyd J. Austin III) and Joint Chiefs Chairman (Charles Q. Brown, Jr.) are Black—a point that may move white supremacists to self-select out of our military.

If you want a Cabinet that overlooks no one in a search of talent, and that looks like America, Harris is your choice. According to an independent newspaper in Michigan, “The Biden-Harris administration has appointed more women and people of color to the federal judiciary than any administration in U.S. history.” [Scroll to end]

With Harris as president, the unrestricted search for talent will have started at the top and will continue on down the line. If you self-identify as a “minority” in any way, this election may be your last chance to set things right.

3. Do you want a president who can think straight? If so, take a look at these three word salads served up by Trump. Hold your nose and force yourself to read them, word for word. (Reading is more analytical than listening.)

Next, ask yourself whether these are the words of a clear, incisive thinker and leader, or of a demented and maybe deranged senior losing his grip. Imagine yourself evaluating a candidate for a difficult and demanding job, involving great intelligence, insight and wisdom. Would you hire Trump based these words from his own mouth?

Our media hardly ever serve these salads raw. They clean them up. They may just be trying to make sense out of nonsense. But in doing so, they do you and our country a disservice: they fail to show Trump as he is, and his thinking as it is. Shouldn’t that evaluation be part of your choice in this crucial election?

4. Trump lies a lot, even in something as important and carefully scrutizined as a presidential debate. Here’s a simple tally, reported in clear terms, from a local newspaper. Trump out-lied Harris at the rate of over thirty to one. He told a whopper, on average, every 1.43 minutes.

Can you excuse him as an inveterate salesman, “reality” TV star, self-promoter and carnival barker? When a man lies that much, it’s unclear whether he even knows what’s true and what’s made up. In other words, his contact with reality is tenuous and fragile.

Do you want someone like that with his finger on The Button? For the sake of your and your offspring’s survival, I’d pick the clear-thinking candidate.

5. Planetary heating is real and accelerating. We could be reaching a tipping point at which it becomes self-sustaining. If you want to have just a good chance to slow it down, let alone to stop it, Harris is your candidate.

Harris sponsored, pushed for and cast the critical 51st vote for legislation to build out renewable energy, make electric cars and their charging infrastructure, and to build American factories with good American jobs to do so. Trump wants to “drill, baby, drill,” mostly in the oil-and-gas fracking states of Texas, Colorado, North Dakota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Louisiana. If you want to drive on the Sun and wind and not heat our planet as you steer, Harris is for you.

6. Trump’s single administation was not just a climate disaster. It was a related industrial disaster. By dropping out of the Paris climate agreement, loosening pollution restrictions on fossil-fueled cars, and emphasizing fossil fuels and vehicles that burn them, Trump put our nation on its back foot in advancing five vital next-generation industries: (a) electric cars, (b) advanced batteries, (c) fossil-free short-range aircraft and drones, (d) solar panels and windmills, and (e) the mines and factories that supply their materials. As a result, as this article explains, China now makes more than half of the world’s electric vehicles (and the cheapest ones), more than 80% of the world’s solar panels and 75% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries. And China controls about 60% of the world’s production of windmills. We are now lagging so far behind in this century’s leading industries that we may never catch up.

Trump rode to the White House on a reputation for being a “business leader.” But he’s nothing like the leaders who built this nation’s industrial base: Andrew Carnegie, the Rockefellers, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, or even Elon Musk. Trump developed, owned and traded (or trades) hotels, golf courses, a failed and fraudulent university, and gambling casinos. He has never designed or built a single piece of machinery, equipment or electronics, so he is no industrialist. When his beloved fossil fuels run out, almost certainly in this century, we will all be left holding an immense bag of stranded assets, including the machinery to dig up fossil fuels, refine them, transport them, and the internal combustion engines that burn them. We will have become a second- or third-world industrial power.

7. If Trump wins again, the Western Enlightenment will end, at least inside the United States. The Enlightenment stands for Reason, including science, in managing human affairs. By his own words, Trump stands for “retribution,” “vengeance,” and “loyalty” to him alone. That’s not Reason. If he wins, the US will go back over 2.5 centuries to the days before the Constitution, when our new territory, not yet a nation, hung on the whim of King George III.

8. Trump’s so-called “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court has done a lot to take us back to the nineteenth century. It’s given us money-driven politics (Citizens United), revocation of women’s reproductive rights (Dobbs overruling Roe), gun massacres, often with weapons of war, nearly every day (Heller, McDonald, Bruen), and rampant voter-suppression laws free from DOJ pre-clearance (Shelby County v. Holder). It has also effectively nullified the clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that disqualifies oath-breaking insurrectionists from holding federal offices (Trump v. Anderson), and put the courts, instead of scientists, doctors and other experts in charge of making close calls on regulatory matters (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo). Finally, it has enabled despotic rule by making presidents immune from prosecution for breaking the law in performing their duties (Trump v. US). If you don’t want the Court to continue its reactionary supermajority for the entire lives of your children and children’s children, then vote for Harris, who will pick better judges and maybe help reform the Supreme Court.

9. Do you work for a living? Then Harris is your choice for president. She’s a protege of the only US president who ever walked a picket line. She believes in and and supports labor unions, fair wages, and corporations and the rich paying their fare share of taxes. She supports stronger labor laws, including higher minimum wages, no taxes on tips, family leave, child tax credits, and employer-provided health insurance. She also has proposed family housing assistance, especially for first-time home buyers. Trump’s sole significant economic legislation, besides pandemic relief, was to reduce taxes, primarily on the rich and big corporations.

10. Our nation is becoming a lawless society. Observance of law, let alone genuine respect for it, is dropping like a stone. Billionaires and corporations cheat on their taxes. Businesses cheat small customers in ways big and small; they brush away consumers’ complaints like flies.

Online businesses are special offenders. They take away our right of access to our courts with flypaper “click-here” contracts that keep you us out of court, preclude class actions, and relegate good complaints to secret arbitation. And antitrust law, which protects the little entrepreneur and consumers from the oligarchs, has undergone a false-flag revolution that makes it largely toothless.

Our ex-president has had 4,000 lawsuits, six bankruptcies, 34 convictions for felony record falsification, two impreachments, and adjudicated civil liability for fraud, defamation, and sexual assault. He is leading the full-scale attack by powerful people on our rule of law. As surely as a fish rots from the head down, re-electing him will complete our transformation to a lawless society, at least for everyone who’s not rich. If you want big corporations to continue to crush you in the courts as they do now in the marketplaces for both products and your labor, Trump is your man.

11. President Kamala Harris would be a breath of fresh air. She spent thirteen of her twenty-one years in elective office as a prosecutor putting criminals behind bars. Enforcing the law is part of her DNA.

She knows how the law works. She won’t have to consult private, paid lawyers to find out what the law is. And she certaintly won’t use our Department of Justice to circumvent it. She will put respect for law and law enforcement back at the top of the DOJ’s list of priorities. And she will make sure that the law applies equally to the poor and rich, the powerless and powerful, and big tax cheats.

12. Harris is a doer. One reason she stayed mostly close to home in her years as Vice-President is that she had to be near the Senate to cast the tie-breaking vote on key bills. She cast 33 tie-breaking votes, or about 11% of all those cast in our Senate since 1789. That was the largest number cast by any vice-president in American history.

In so doing, Harris enabled passage of major legislation for: (1) Covid-19 pandemic relief; (2) building and repairing infrastructure in every state; (3) major climate-change initiatives, including 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles; and (4) laws to lower the prices of common prescription drugs like insulin.

13. In contrast, Trump is an inveterate, compulsive liar, quite apart from the desperate lies in his recent debate, discussed in Point 5 above. The Washington Post counted and substantiated 30,573 lies and misleading claims that he made just while president. In stark contast, Harris levels with her colleagues and the American public. She learned to be truthful beause she had to be, under penalty of perjury and disbarment, in her thirteen years as a public prosecutor.

14. Trump’s biggest lie was that Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election. Fox, which helped promulgate that lie, settled a defamation suit by a voting-machine company (whose machines Fox had accused of being rigged) for $787 million dollars. Fox was forced to settle after news broke that its own announcers and executives had repudiated and even ridiculed that accusation privately while airing it “seriously” as supposedly truthful news. Do you want to encourage a proven liar who will likely incite another insurrection if he loses?

15. Trump favors and encourages political violence, at least by his supporters. He encouraged and helped incite the January 6 Insurrection, which ultimately caused four deaths and injuries, mostly to police. At his rallies, he had repeatedly approved violence against protestors and dissenters, whether by police or bystanders. For example, he lauded a Republican member of Congress for “body slamming” a reporter just trying to do his job.

16. Do you want government and other people’s religion telling you and your loved ones how to live?

Here’s what the Chief Judge of the Alabama Supreme Court wrote [pages 37-38], in ruling that a frozen fetus kept for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a “person” entitled to the same rights as a live baby:

“In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”

Does this sound like good law to you, let alone science, medicine, or even Reason? Trump lauds and elevates judges like this. Over 80% of radical Christian evangelicals support him.

As president, Trump would likely put people like this Alabama judge in positions of power over you and your family. In contrast, Harris supports families’ reproductive rights and privacy. As a woman herself, she does so out of true conviction and personal experience. If you want government and other people’s religion out of your bedroom and your most intimate family decisionmaking, Harris is for you.

17. Trump is a classic bully, like a kid on a grammar-school playground. He has ridiculed and mimicked—among many others—a women (Meghan Kelly) for menstruating, an aging but beloved actor (Michael Fox) for suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and President Biden himself for suffering (and mostly overcoming) stuttering from an early age. Do you want a supreme leader who has empathy, or one who takes cruel joy in others’ disability and suffering, just like a mean kid?

18. If Trump wins, the US will hang Ukraine out to dry. Without American weapons and ammunition (which fit Ukraine’s needs better than anything Europe makes), Ukraine will lose territory or fall entirely to Putin’s Russia. Then Russia will pull right up to NATO’s border. That will increase the risk of war, including nuclear war. It will also put our strongest and longest allies—countries like Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Germany—closer to the front lines of a possible next world war.

UPDATE:  Less than eight hours after I originally this post first went live, I read a full-throated condemnation of Trump’s wacky distaste toward Ukraine and his self-obsessed reasons for it.

Its author, David French, is one of very few evangelical Christian pundits who is not a Trump fan.  He makes the case that Trump’s refusal to support Ukraine’s defense comes from personal animosity based on  Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s refusal to find dirt on Hunter Biden and inability to find “proof” of a mythical conspiracy-theory Ukrainian server that, rather than Russia, Trump believed had been the source of attempts to influence the 2016 election.

French concludes his analysis as follows: “Trump’s reluctance [in the debate] to say the plain truth—that a Ukrainian victory is in America’s national interest—demonstrates that he is still a prisoner to his own grievances, and there is no one left who can stop him from doing his worst.”   French’s must-read piece also corroborates Point 4 of this post.  Trump is, in French’s words, “corrupt and lunatic” enough to readjust our national foreign policy based on an ally’s failure to advance Trump’s own personal agenda and twisted vision of reality.

    19. If Trump wins, he will support Israel’s rogue and authoritarian Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, without much question or pushback. As a result, the chance for a truly self-governing, peaceful Palestianian state will decrease, if not vanish entirely.

Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Tom Friedman, a knowledgeable, connected and influential pundit on the Middle East, who incidentally is Jewish. Whether you support Israel or the Palestinians (or both!), a Trump victory will bring more disaster and death to the people you care about, because nothing important will change.

Yet more chaos is never a solution for war. Aren’t 76 years of Middle-Eastern carnage enough? A vote for Trump is an indirect vote for Netanyahu and more of the same.

20. Project 2025 is a near-thousand-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Although Trump claims not to follow it, and even not to have heard about it, its authors and backers include most of his prominent supporters and financial backers.

Among many authoritarian plans in Project 2025 is one to deprive workers in the federal administration of civil-service protection, fire them, and replace most or all of them with people whose primary qualification is blind loyalty to Donald Trump himself, or to the GOP that he now owns. The Plan also recommends eliminating the entire Department of Education, with all its rules for equal treatment of students and educational excellence.

Under this plan, the people most likely to be dismissed and replaced will be the doctors, engineers, Ph.D.s and other experts who, collectively, keep your: (a) air and water clean (EPA); (b) workplaces safe (OSHA), (c) food and drink healthy and safe (FDA and USDA), (d) drugs, medicines and medical devices safe and effective (FDA); (e) cars, trucks, roads and highways safe (NHTSA); and (f) aircraft safe and properly maintained (FAA). Do you want these tasks to continue to be done by well-qualified experts? Or do you want your and your family’s safety and health in the hands of political appointees chosen for their loyatly to a single man and his wacky right-wing views?

21. Harris has a sunny personality and a lot of empathy. She has lived the life of the middle class, coming up from the bottom as a daughter of two immigrants. Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and belittles, insults and ridicules his opposition. He makes unlikely and absurd claims about his own intelligence, accomplishments and supporters. Like a cruel child, he makes fun of the lame and disabled and selects demeaning nicknames for his opponents, rather than argue with them on the merits. Which is the better way to “make America great again”? to build a coalition to get things done?

22. Trump cozies up to dictators and despots, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. He even cited a rising would-be dictator, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, as a “character reference” in his debate with Harris.

Harris opposes dictators and tyrants and lays down bright lines that they shouldn’t cross. As an emissary of President Biden and our US intelligence community, Harris flew to Kyiv to warn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy four days before the Russian invasion of his country started. That warning probably saved Ukraine from catastrophe. In a world that a nuclear-armed ICBM can cross in 30 minutes, who do you think will keep you and your family safer?

23. Harris believes in democracy. She’s practiced it all her life, with skill, experience, and bipartisanship. She has twenty-one years of experience in elective political office, the most of any president (except her mentor Joe Biden) since and including Bill Clinton. She also has had eight years of higher education. Trump’s only experience in politics is in the top job for four years, and he had only four years of higher education. These deficits show.

24. Many of Trump’s advisers, both formal and informal, were over-the-top right-wing radicals like Steven Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Stephen Miller, and the current conspiracy theorist du jour, Laura Loomer. Trump granted clemency or pardons to many accused or convicted of crimes, including: Bannon, Flynn, Charles Kushner (the father of Trump’s son-in-law), Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone. Mainstream Republican Mitt Romney called Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence, “unprecedented, historic corruption.” Do you want a president whose team breaks the law to keep him in power and advance his “policies,” and who then grants them clemency?

25. Trump also granted clemency —against the advice of military leaders—to court-martialed military officers accused or convicted of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to seven Republican congressmen convicted of crimes: Chris Collins, Duncan D. Hunter, Steve Stockman, Rick Renzi, Robin Hayes, Mark Siljander, and Randall “Duke” Cunningham. Do you want a president who unndermines the rule of law by granting his political backers clemency after they’ve been adjudged to have broken the law? Is this the way to “drain the swamp”?

26. To anyone who has (or is) a grandparent, Trump is showing clear signs of age and dementia, if not derangement. He’s mixed up former President Obama and President Biden, and his own erstwhile Republican rival Nikki Haley with the much older Democrat Nancy Pelosi. These are gaffes that older people sometimes make. But only Trump has recommended nonsense cures like intravenous bleach and livestock-dewormer for Covid. Only he has bashed immigrants for speaking “languages” that “no one speaks.” Trump had a father who suffered and died from Alzheimer’s disease, which is known to have genetic roots and can be inherited.

27. This year’s race for the presidency is a two-person race. No one else has a ghost of a chance of winning. A vote for anyone other than Kamala Harris—or a failure to vote at all—is a vote for Trump. A vote for any third person is just throwing your vote away and, with it, your chance to influence the future of your country and your species.

28. This last point applies on steroids if you vote in a so-called “Battleground State.” Not only does every vote matter there: every vote is magnified at least tenfold.

Here are the margins of people’s individual votes by which Biden won all of each state’s Electoral College votes in 2020: Arizona (10,457), Georgia (12,670), Michigan (154,188), Nevada (33,596), Pennsylvania (81,660), Wisconsin (20,682). The total margin by which Biden won the Electoral College was 44,000 in three of these states. (Biden won the 2020 election nationally by nearly 7 millon votes; but that number didn’t and won’t matter; only the Electoral College vote counts.)

These are hardly astronomical numbers. Don’t be among the few whose votes, or whose failure to vote at all, puts Trump over the top.



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