Freddy Gray

In a society that worships the self, identity politics is a very powerful force. We see this now in Kamalamania – the dizzying speed with which the vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee has been turned, through mass acclamation, from national embarrassment to Democratic saviour.  Will Kamalamania last until the election is over? The fact that Harris’s transfiguration doesn’t make much sense is sort of the point – the more improbable it seems the better. We are memetic creatures, especially in the digital age, and the meme of the moment is that Harris has magically invigorated the Democratic base and turned the 2024 US presidential election around in their party’s favour.

Donald Trump has been revising his big convention speech in light of his brush with death at the weekend. ‘I basically had a speech that was an unbelievable rip-roarer,’ he told two interviewers yesterday. It was brutal – really good, really tough... I threw it out... I think it would be very bad if I got up and started going wild about how horrible everybody is, and how corrupt and crooked, even if it’s true. Had this not happened, we had a speech that was pretty well set that was extremely tough. Now, we have a speech that is more unifying. He’s Donald Trump, not Mahatma Gandhi Trump the Unifier-in-Chief? His many enemies would scoff at the thought.

When there are acts of violence on a campaign trail, we often hear about how this is a commentary on our uniquely toxic, hyper-partisan times. You won’t have to go far to find people now seeking to blame Donald Trump for stirring up the forces that almost killed him last night. But running for president in the United States is – and always has been – a very risky business. Every major candidate is an assassination target, and is given security detail to reflect this obvious fact.  Let’s look at the history. In 1835, Richard Lawrence tried to shoot President Andrew Jackson. In 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. In 1881, Charles Guiteau shot and killed President James A. Garfield. In 1901, Leon Czolgosz killed President William McKinley.

Everybody knows that Joe Biden isn’t really there. His denials of ill-health are in fact a symptom of it – he clings angrily to his delusions because that is what people do when their minds go. And since he seems so immovable, the question is whether Democrats can somehow buy into Biden’s alternate reality again in time for 2024. Can the party re-delude itself into thinking that he is somehow reversing the ageing process, even if that makes them look and sound ever more ridiculous? What we’re seeing is the increasingly disembodied Artificial Biden who will fight the rest of this campaign And the answer is: yes, they can! We are now moving into a new age of AB – Artificial Biden.

Stick or twist? The gambler’s choice is the Democrats’ awful dilemma as the US presidential election draws ever closer. Do they stick with Joe Biden, their painfully decrepit Commander-in-Chief, who is losing in the polls? Or twist and gamble on replacing him, which could tear the party apart and make Donald Trump’s victory even more likely? The President may already be on borrowed time The news over the weekend showed that the Democrats are already at war with themselves. Biden’s ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos did little to reassure the President’s anxious supporters and Sunday brought more news of House Democrats, and other senior Democratic figures, calling for him to make way.