Joe biden

Washington, DC He's back: Donald Trump will be elected the 47th president of the United States. In the end, it was not a close affair: Trump triumphed over Vice President Kamala Harris, with a win in Pennsylvania called by Fox News at 1:20 a.m. ET bringing him within a whisker of the requisite 270 Electoral College votes and a call in Wisconsin at 1:47 a.m. pushing him over the precipice. Decision Desk, meanwhile, included Alaska's Electoral College votes and called the election for Trump at 1:21 a.m. ET. Victory in the remaining states — Arizona, Michigan and Nevada — would give him a landslide. The New York Times is also currently projecting a popular vote triumph for Trump. The Republicans have also won control of the US Senate.

Nobody ever talks about this anymore, but there was a time when Democrats were floating Kamala Harris as a potential Supreme Court pick. Shortly after the death of Antonin Scalia, the Los Angeles Times published an article about how she may be on Barack Obama’s shortlist. Speculation reached a “fever pitch,” they reported. Harris said she was flattered by the consideration, even as she declined the opportunity. That’s a footnote in American history that’s worth revisiting, now that Election Day is almost here. Imagine the kind of people who would tell us, with a straight face, that Kamala Harris should replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. On the one hand, you have one of the leading legal minds in all of American history.

The latest wisdom from our tottering, angry president was to call Donald Trump’s supporters “garbage.” He was responding to the inexcusable “joke” by a warm-up comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. The comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, stepped all over what should have been Trump’s big story: his triumphant rally. Biden stepped all over what should have been Kamala Harris’s: her effective closing speech on the Ellipse, in front of the White House.  These disparaging references are loathsome, whatever their political impact. They cheapen our public life. But they are also political mistakes.

Washington, DC Vice President Kamala Harris made her last stand at the scene of her opponent Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 address to his supporters: the Ellipse south of the White House on Washington’s National Mall. Her argument was reminiscent of her predecessor as the Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden: eschewing the nebulous “joy” that had characterized her anointing at the Democratic National Convention, Harris opted to intone about the grave threat a second Trump term would pose to America and western democracy. But can that approach work two presidential elections in a row? Attendees waved the Stars and Stripes, with backdrops reading “FREEDOM” and “USA” adorning the riders.

There has been no shortage of coverage of the 10 million-plus illegal aliens who have stormed our borders, the 5 million-plus who’ve been waived into the country and the Biden/Harris administration’s misuse of the humanitarian parole system. But almost nothing has been written about a legal, backdoor entry to the United States that large numbers of migrants continue to exploit: increasingly easy-to-obtain American tourist visas. As I’ve been documenting since 2008, many aspiring migrants find it easy to fraudulently convince my former colleagues at the State Department that they qualify for tourist visas and thus do not need a coyote to help them sneak into the country. But it appears as though this trend has gone into overdrive during the Biden-Harris administration.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is in trouble, which means we may be in for one hell of a post-election fireworks show.   If she loses the presidential election, there will be intra-Democratic Party in-fighting unlike anything we’ve seen before. The recriminations will be extraordinary. There will be finger-pointing, backstabbing, excuse-making and an air of panic that will make even the sleazy, widespread gossip-peddling that followed the late Senator John McCain’s defeat in 2008 look tame.   How do we know this will happen? Because it has happened before, albeit on a smaller scale.

Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with Fox News’s Bret Baier for a half-hour interview in which Baier politely took no prisoners, pressing Harris on the issues most voters cite as their top concerns. Harris took almost zero accountability for the Biden-Harris administration’s failures and offered few answers on her specific policy positions, pivoting instead to besmirching rival Donald Trump and provide offerings from her platitude grab-bag. Baier hit the ground running by asking Harris how many illegal immigrants she thought her administration has released to date — “One, 2 million?

Another day, another spat between White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Fox News’s Peter Doocy. This time Jean-Pierre, dressed in an outlandish pinstripe suit, snatched up her fastidiously labeled binder and walked out after attempting to answer Doocy’s questions about hurricane relief funds, which she claimed were based on “misinformation.” Karine Jean-Pierre faced reporters Tuesday in an oversized gray — male? — suit and a bright purple collar shirt. After giving her “topper,” which mainly memorialized lives lost on October 7 and addressed the devastation and conspiracy theories surrounding Hurricane Helene, Jean-Pierre took questions from reporters. “Thank you, Karine,” Peter Doocy said in minute forty-four, after thirty or so minutes of questions.

When the sitting president is not running for reelection, the party typically turns to his vice president as the “natural” nominee. That’s true again this year, now that the Democratic Party powerbrokers forced Biden out of the race, fearing he would not only lose the White House but sink down-ballot Democrats alongside him. So, the party turned to his vice president to lead the ticket. That’s commonplace in the modern era, but it’s a relatively new development. It wasn’t true before the 1950s. That change raises three questions: 1. What was the earlier role of the vice president? 2. Why has that role changed? and 3. Why do those changes make it likely, though not certain, the VP will become the party’s next nominee?