The Patriot Post® · Trump and Harris Vie for the Culture

By Douglas Andrews ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/110390-trump-and-harris-vie-for-the-culture-2024-09-20

“If somebody breaks in my house, they’re gettin’ shot.”

So said Kamala Harris last night to a somewhat surprised Oprah Winfrey during a two-hour “Unite for America” event in Detroit, where they were joined via Zoom by such leftist glitterati as Meryl Streep, Ben Stiller, and Chris Rock.

Harris donned her best black accent to make the remark — which was preceded by another enthusiastic admission that she and her running mate, Tim Walz, are both gun owners. These words were scripted, of course, and their purpose was clear: to make her seem more centrist, more sensible, more palatable to independent white folks than the typical Bay-area progressive of Jamaican-Indian descent who grew up in Canada and whose ancestors were slaveowners and whose dad was a Marxist college professor. After all, this is the same Kamala Harris who’s on record as having declared stand-your-ground laws to be racist.

Harris had other flubs during the evening, such as when she was asked a question by an audience member about illegal immigration and border security.

“So it’s a wonderful and important question,” Harris began. “I, you know, my background was as a prosecutor, and I was also the elected attorney general for two terms of a border state. So, this is not a theoretical issue for me. This is something I’ve actually worked on.” Harris continued to meander for three painful and robotic minutes, ultimately blaming Republicans for our border crisis. And that’s when Winfrey bailed her out.

“So, to answer Justin’s question,” Winfrey interrupted. “Now that that bill is gone and hasn’t passed, will you introduce—”

That’s when Harris jumped back in and said, “Absolutely. When I am elected as president of the United States, I will make sure that bill gets to my desk, and I will sign it into law.”

But as to the original question — “What would be specific steps to strengthening the border?” — Harris failed to answer it. But, hey, at least she didn’t tell us for the umpteenth time how she “grew up in a middle-class household.”

Harris’s substance-free performance might not matter, though, because culture is king in American politics. And Democrat voters, millions of whom are of the low-information variety, care more about style than substance. Harris’s handlers know this, which is why instead of holding a press conference — at which members of the media might ask some serious and probing questions about, say, her support of taxpayer-funded sex-change operations for imprisoned illegal immigrants or about her bizarre flip-flops on issues from fracking to defunding the police to abolishing ICE to ending private healthcare to bailing out BLM rioters to giving blacks their own set of laws — Harris chose to sit down with Oprah Winfrey and friends.

Remember, though, her “values haven’t changed.”

Donald Trump, meanwhile, was also out there on the cultural front, which he dominates like no presidential candidate in American history.

Fresh off another assassination attempt, Trump made a raucous and entertaining hour-long appearance on Greg Gutfeld’s top-rated late-night show. Regular guest Tyrus gave him a “Trump 2024” championship belt and proclaimed him “the people’s champion.”

“I always said golf is a very dangerous game,” he said. It was classic Trump.

The former president then stopped by a Lower East Side dive bar, and no doubt became the first candidate to ever pay a bar tab in Bitcoin. Then it was off to an overflow rally at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, where folks lined the streets two- and three-deep along the way. There, at the event, he pounded Harris on policy and told the Democrats and their Leftmedia lickspittles: “Stop the hoaxes, stop the smears, stop the lawfare and the fake lawsuits against me, and stop claiming your opponents will turn America into a dictatorship.”

We aren’t the first to say it, but it bears repeating: Politics is indeed downstream from culture. Trump gets it, and so, apparently, does Harris.

Whether the American people will ultimately drill down beneath this and discover that there’s no there there when it comes to Oakland’s Kamala Harris — that’s a question that’ll be answered in dribs and drabs over the next 46 days.

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