Vice President Kamala Harris did a lot better against President Donald Turmp than Joe Biden, that is undeniable. However, there are a lot of saving graces for President Trump’s performance.
President Joe Biden was pressured into dropping out of the race by his own party after a disastrous debate performance in June. Now, as the momentum is shifting back towards Trump, the limelight will be on Vice President Kamala Harris on the stage.
Axios has recently published a story in which the chair of the Harris-Walz campaign calls Democrats ‘the clear underdogs’ in the presidential election. While Harris is performing well in public polling, rumours are that her team’s internal numbers tell a different story. This is also evidenced by the fact that she is making a campaign stop in New Hampshire, a state that is supposedly safe blue in 2024.
Over the weekend, the Israeli Defense Forces found the bodies of six Israeli hostages killed by the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. In their initial reports major international media outlets were reluctant to spell out Hamas’s responsibility in their headlines, unsurprisingly for those who have been following the conflict and the media coverage attentively from the beginning of the war. This most recent example highlights the mainstream media’s growing tendency to deny or distort reality when it suits them.
Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris blatantly copied Donald Trump’s proposal for eliminating taxes on tips, as well as including a very similar plan for child tax credit in her economic agenda to what JD Vance proposed during a TV interview. That is despite the fact that she is currently leading the national polling aggregate on RealClearPolitics.
Most pollsters did a lousy job in 2020 in the United States, most often overestimating the popularity of Joe Biden. This year polls have claimed a Kamala Harris surge since Biden withdrew from the race, with many conservatives now fearing that Trump may be defeated after all by the clearly incompetent, but allegedly popular Democratic candidate. But the numbers recorded in the five battleground states that decided the last election seem to suggest otherwise.
An awful lot of rare historical events for one election cycle happened this year in the US, most of which do not favour the incumbent party. Nothing is a better testament to that than the fact that this week in Chicago it will be Vice President Kamala Harris who accepts the nomination, and not President Joe Biden. That is despite President Biden, as billionaire Elon Musk pointed out in a post on his own social media platform X, having been very adamant about staying in the race until just a month ago.
‘The Democrats, who often accuse Trump of populism, demagoguery, and fascism, are increasingly resorting to demagogic, populist, and fascist tactics themselves by instilling fear and turning Trump into a bogeyman, repeating the tired old tropes about him incessantly (not to mention using other means such as deploying law enforcement and the judiciary for partisan purposes against their political opponent). As posted on Facebook by the GOP, on the night of 19 August alone, the word “Trump” was mentioned 147 times at the DNC meanwhile “inflation” three times, “crime” six times, and “border” only eight times.’
As expected, the ‘chat’ between former US President and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Elon Musk has gone viral. The interview, broadcast live on X on Monday evening, US time, has garnered over 168 million views by the time of writing. The discussion spanned a wide range of topics, including inflation, the border crisis, and the Democrats’ foreign policy. Trump, of course, did not hold back in his criticism of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Within hours of the announcement of Kamala Harris picking Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, the American news site POLITICO published an article comparing Governor Walz’s views of PM Orbán of Hungary to that of Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Vice Presidental candidate on the Republican side.
‘I think being in the conservative world, you’re used to the media fabricating things. So, it’s nice to see with my own eyes, and to hear from the people that live here. Obviously,Hungary is viewed favourably by the right wing. I know Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán have met several times, Tucker Carlson has been here. So, in the circles I run in, people have great things to say about Hungary.’
For all the legitimate concerns about a second Trump presidency, Mr. Biden’s feeble governance—or whoever was running the show behind the scenes—and the falsehoods fed to the American public by the Democrats as to his mental and physical incapacities have achieved exactly what President Biden accused Mr. Trump of: weakening democracy.
This year’s presidential election in the United States was a prominent topic at MCC Feszt 2024. A whole panel of speakers, namely Miklós Szánthó, James Carafano, Mark Milosch, and István Stumpf, discussed how they see the contest between Republican Donald J. Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris is shaping up.
‘The Nixon coalition that really springboarded him as such a popular President—people really forget how popular of a President he was—that was the same sort of coalition that carried Reagan, it’s the same sort of coalition that is now going to carry Trump. It’s a working-class, America First coalition, it crosses socio-economic divides, it crosses racial lines, it crosses ethnic lines, it’s a very strong and growing emerging populous majority. And I think we are going to see the fruits of that this cycle,’ Gavin Wax told Hungarian Conservative.
Biden’s abrupt exit from the presidential race and anointment of Vice President Kamala Harris as his would-be successor has certainly left world leaders in disarray—not that they were not expecting it, given the obvious lack of both physical stamina and mental acuity of the US president. Regardless, as they continue to grapple with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, an escalation in the Middle East, and a more emphatic China, world leaders are contemplating if there will be a second Trump’s ‘America First’ administration or a continuity of Biden’s ‘America is Back’ through Kamala Harris.
In an unprecedented twist of events, we now have the incumbent party running a non-incumbent candidate, while the non-incumbent party is running a former incumbent candidate. The incumbent advantage is a well-documented phenomenon in American politics, a lot of which is due to simple name recognition. This aspect now heavily favours Former President Trump.
In a letter posted on the social media platform X on Sunday, Joe Biden stated: ‘I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.’ He also promised to elaborate on the details of his decision in a speech to the nation later this week.
Just as in the presidential debate, Joe Biden failed to deliver an acceptable performance in his ‘big boy’ press conference this morning. The voices of discontent within the Democratic Party are growing louder. Whether the current president should step aside and hand his presidential candidacy to Vice President Kamala Harris remains to be seen in the coming days.
The president of MRC Free Speech America reminded that the only criminal charges of the many against President Trump that have any legal merit are the ones related to mishandling classified information. However, it is actually common for Presidents to keep some classified documents in their private residences from their times in office: even Joe Biden did so after leaving the Vice Presidency, yet he was never charged. Mr Schneider also opined that we would not see a criminal trial of Donald Trump before the election, as by the time the Supreme Court hands down its ruling on his immunity case, there would be no time to put him on trial before 5 November.
The incumbent POTUS often emphasised bipartisan messages in his speech, and yet did not seem to convince either side of the aisle.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.