“The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism.” —George Washington (1796)

After covering Joe Biden’s long-ago-scripted campaign withdrawal, and then providing a Kamala Harris clown bio explaining how this post-turtle presidential candidate got here, it is time for a reality check for all those Republican strategists and pundits who are certain Donald Trump will defeat Harris.

It was obvious that the Biden/Harris regime did not want to run on their disastrous records of domestic and foreign policy failures, both records being indicative of what the next four years would look like.

So they pulled off the “Big Swap” last month, in order to pretend like Harris just fell off a turnip truck and gets to start with a clean political slate. Indeed, her campaign website says nothing about her policies past or future, just the typical Demo virtue-signaling tripe.

I can assure you her Leftmedia publicists will do everything in their sphere of influence, combined with the Left’s speech suppression machine, to pull off that charade, recasting her in the leftist groupthink mold. After all, these are the same dullards who attempted to recast Biden as George Washington after the Big Swap.

They will have their work cut out for them, especially hiding her role as Biden’s “border czar,” which they are desperately trying to whitewash and which Harris claims she never was. However, the record is clear. Clearly, she presided over Biden’s open border invasion across our “secure” border, as “Border Czar Harris” called it.

That would include all those who have murdered and violently assaulted American citizens, as well as those pesky terror watch list invaders the administration released across the nation.

After ghosting the media since the Big Swap in order to avoid any questions about the Biden/Harris record, Harris was front and center this week announcing her VP ticket mate.

But first things first…

Despite the fact she was not a primary candidate, at midnight Monday, Harris locked up the Demo delegates she needed for the Democrat nomination, which is probably the right sequence before announcing your VP.

As you now know, Harris tagged another leftist, an old white guy named Tim Walz, the mostly unknown governor of Minnesota. Oh, I said “another leftist,” but actually he is a protégé of aging socialist Bernie Sanders, and Walz is far left of the rest of America, an avowed enemy of the fundamental principles of American Liberty. And I said “old guy,” but actually he is 60, just a few months older than Harris, but he looks and acts more like a crazy octogenarian Bernie Bro.

For the record, I thought Harris might tap Sen. Mark Kelly (AZ), one of the few Democrats with actual military experience, who is married to retired Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ). Giffords, like Trump, survived an assassination attempt a decade ago, but unlike Trump, she then became a poster child for the Left’s gun confiscation agenda.

Kelly would have filled Harris’s dearth of gravitas, and Giffords lined up with her agenda to mandate firearm buybacks. But news of Kelly’s previous divorce, including the restraining order filed by his ex-wife, combined with questions about his business dealings with Red China — kinda like those of the “Big Guy” — took him off the list.

Apparently, those issues do not matter to his Arizona constituents. But given that Kamala’s husband cheated with a nanny in his previous marriage, I thought Kelly could skirt by! (It seems that Harris has a soft spot for philanderers…)

Once Kelly was out, I thought maybe Harris would pick Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, which likely would have put that state solidly in the Democrat column. But apparently Harris’s strategists determined that three Jews among the top two Demo Party couples would be two too many for their congressional Jew haters and their anti-Semite constituencies.

As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) observed, “Let’s be clear: Kamala didn’t cave to the antisemitic, pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party. She belongs to the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic party.”

So, it’s Walz. And this clown combo should not be underestimated.

Walz is plain about his socialist Democrat Party worldview: “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

Recall that during the Demo-sponsored Summer of Rage ahead of the 2020 election, Walz was cheerleading the riots. His wife Gwen noted fondly: “I could smell the burning tires … and I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening.”

Those would be among the same Marxist so-called “Black Lives Matter” rioters nationwide that Harris was bailing out of jail at the same time she was supporting defunding police.

Political analyst Stephen Miller notes of Harris/Walz: “A presidential ticket where one person enabled the burning down of his own state and the other person advocated bailing out the people who did it.”

Walz does have some military background, having served with the Nebraska and Minnesota Army National Guard, though his fellow Guardsmen confirmed he abandoned his unit just ahead of its deployment to Iraq.

When Walz left the National Guard to launch his congressional campaign, his campaign announcement asserted he was “a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom,” OEF, the War in Afghanistan. That was a lie.

Iraqi War Veteran David Thul called out Walz’s campaign on this fallacious claim in 2009, saying then: “Operation Enduring Freedom is limited to Afghanistan and the airspace directly above. Congressman Walz is clearly claiming … to be an Enduring Freedom veteran. Nobody disputes the fact that he is not an Afghanistan or Enduring Freedom veteran. So this represents a fairly serious issue.”

And more serious now…

Two years earlier, still in the NG, Walz participated in a protest, carrying a sign noting “Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry.” That would be the traitorous John Kerry of Swift Boat infamy. Walz had a short Guard deployment in Italy, but never set foot in Afghanistan.

Further, Walz claimed in one of his more recent leftist rants calling for gun confiscation, “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is [sic] the only place where those weapons are at.” We checked his DD 214 and he was never in any combat theater, prompting Marine Veteran JD Vance, who actually did deploy to Iraq, to ask, “Tim Walz, when were you ever in war?”

That claim got a quick “fact-checkers” smackdown from even CNN’s Tom Foreman, who kindly noted, “Walz did make a comment speaking to a group, he’s done it a couple of times, where he has used language that has suggested that he carried weapons in a fighting situation. … There is no evidence that at any time Governor Walz was in the position of being shot at, and some of his language could easily be seen to suggest that he was. So that is absolutely false when he said that about gun rights out there.”

These claims amount to stolen valor, and perhaps the phantom PTSD he suffered as a result of his phantom war experience accounts for his DUI record… Some of the Harris/Walz adoring media now are trying to correct their parroted campaign claims about his military service claims.

Oh, and Walz also claimed in campaign promotions that he is a former “Command Sergeant Major” despite not completing the requirements for that rank. He briefly held that rank until it was officially demoted to Master Sergeant.

Apparently Harris’s vetting team should have dug a little deeper on Walz, but most of her constituents don’t know how to spell valor. And heck, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) got away with stolen valor for years, so it runs in the Party.

As for his record as governor, National Review’s Jim Geraghty notes: “The dirty, not-so-little not-so-secret about Walz is that he’s not a good manager. On his watch, the Minnesota government has endured one embarrassing scandal after another entailing mismanagement, fraud, waste, and abuse.” Shocked, just shocked…

So, we now face the most left-wing ticket in American history, and Harris/Walz have all the support they will need from billionaire leftist George Soros, their celebrity fans, and the Demo progressive caucus.

Can Trump/Vance knock off Harris/Walz?

As I noted last week, “Harris checked two very important ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ virtue-signaling boxes to become Biden’s VP — the all-important 'female’ and ‘African American’ boxes.”

The binary female box is critical because majorities of Demo female voters are responsible for the election of every Democrat president since John F. Kennedy. (For every conservative woman reading this, thank you for standing against that loud leftist female tide. I have watched my wife endure the strain, and you have my gratitude.)

As for that “African American” box, Harris has claimed to be Indian, Asian, and black, though given that her paternal ancestors were white Irish slave-traders, she is actually mostly Indian. (Where are the slavery cancel culture mobs when you need them?)

It is fine for Harris to be proud of all her ethnic heritage, but we should all be AMERICAN first and foremost. Of course, that does not fit the Demos’ hyphenated constituent division agenda.

But most of her constituents are not smart enough to see beyond those two boxes, and any criticism of Harris will be declared racist.

The Trump campaign insists it “is well-positioned to prosecute the case against a weak, failed, incompetent, and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris.”

But Harris is going to focus on this split-screen campaign theme, “Prosecutor vs. Perp,” as she goes after Trump’s fabricated felony record: “Before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was elected attorney general, as I’ve mentioned, to California. Before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

She outlined her campaign theme: “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion and rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear and hate?” The implication is that Harris and her Demos are the party of “freedom, compassion and rule of law” when in fact their political fortunes are rooted in “chaos, fear and hate.”

Many conservatives suggest Harris is an easy mark. Political analyst Byron York concludes, “She is a provably terrible candidate, possibly the worst candidate Democrats could field in their current situation.”

I hope he is right, but as I argued the moment Biden withdrew, despite some claiming Harris made Trump’s path to victory easier, I think Trump’s election prospects just got much steeper — an electoral uphill slog.

As I noted six months ago in “Trump’s Prospects When Demo Delegates Dump Biden,” take the issue of Biden’s age and non compos mentis incompetence out of the matchup, and any polling gap advantage Trump has will quickly close.

The polling after the Big Swap affirms that assessment.

The national RCP average, which is left-biased but a good indicator of trends, had Trump leading Biden by 3-4 points nationally, but this week, Harris has overtaken Trump 47.4 to 46.9, a lead that is growing incrementally despite serious economic concerns. And three key states where Trump was leading Biden — Arizona (6 points), Georgia (4 points), and North Carolina (5 points) — are now all even.

Moreover, Harris’s favorability polling is now better than Trump’s favorability polling.

I expect her momentum to increase through the Democratic National Convention (August 19-22), and we’ll see if it holds after that. The unmitigated fear and hatred of Trump, which Biden and Harris have masterfully cultivated for years, particularly since the J6 Capitol riot, will keep most Demos in Harris’s voting line.

Recall that the 2022 midterm Republican “Red Wave” turned into a “Red Ripple,” with Republicans barely winning the House and losing the Senate split majority — despite Biden’s low approval ratings. I noted then that it was “more a referendum on Trump’s prospects than Biden’s abysmal performance.”

Political prognosticator Allan Lichtman says Harris wins, as does pundit Nate Silver.

Former Obama adviser David Axelrod warns: “There’s a lot of irrational exuberance on the Democratic side of the aisle right now because there was despair for some period of time about what November was going to look like. … But it is absolutely Trump’s race to lose right now. He is ahead, and he is ahead in most of the battleground states. … I think it’s a wide-open race, but Trump has the advantage right now, and … everybody should be sober about that on the Democratic side.”

Of course, the polling that matters most is the Election Day polls in battleground states. The election will come down to decisions in the swing states and how effective the Democrats’ massive bulk-mail ballot fraud strategy works this time around.

As I noted after the 2020 election, it was closer than appearances would imply. Biden’s narrow 51.3% majority of the popular vote (81,283,501) gave him 306 electoral votes, while Trump received 46.9% of the popular vote (74,223,975) and 232 electoral votes. Biden’s seven million-vote margin was mostly in California and New York (precisely why the Demos want to eliminate the Electoral College), but Biden actually won the presidency by fewer than 43,000 votes in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

Finally, two points:

First, this election is about much more than Kamala Harris and Tim Walz; it is about the pervasive threat posed by the socialist Democrat Party to American Liberty.

But Harris and Walz are the current leaders of that threat. Just contemplate the longterm damage this duo will do, most notably to the Supreme Court with the help of the Demo Senate nuclear option.

As political observer Dennis Prager notes: “I have never understood why Republicans always concentrate their fire on their Democratic opponent while ignoring virtually any mention of the threat posed by the Democratic Party and the Left. … ‘The destructive, dangerous Democratic Party has to go.’ That should be — and should have been for decades — the message of every Republican candidate for every office in the land.”

Second, the reemergence of Trump’s fratricidal attacks against fellow conservatives, particularly in swing states, significantly undermines the prospect that he will defeat Harris in November. (More on that next week.)

Trump must refocus on his exceptional domestic and foreign policy record compared to the Biden/Harris regime’s disastrous record of failures.

Finally, to end on a lighter note, watch a great Harris campaign parody here.

Footnote: Since Harris is hiding behind the Leftmedia curtain, refusing interviews and having her few economic proposals panned by both left and right side analysts, the RNC launched a website listing Harris’s policy record.

(Updated)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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