Whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump won Tuesday evening’s debate in Philadelphia, the losers were the American people. The elephants in the living rooms of ordinary Americans were evaded.

Illegal aliens are storming across the southwest border in hordes, murdering and raping citizens with impunity. Maryland Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested a record-breaking 161 sex offenders this fiscal year. Illegal aliens are stealing jobs from hardworking Americans by accepting substandard wages and working conditions. They are overwhelming our public schools in major cities like New York City and Chicago. In Plyler v. Doe (1982), the United States Supreme Court held that illegal alien children are constitutionally entitled to a free public education.

This is madness. Neither Harris nor Trump has a credible plan to end illegal immigration with the stroke of a pen (i.e., an executive order, such as the one former President Barack Obama unsheathed to create 800,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals “Dreamers”). Building a wall without more legislation creates an illusion of safety, like the French Maginot Line against a Nazi attack.

I have an apology to make. I accepted at face value and broadcast Mr. Trump’s alarmist, counterfactual declarations about immigrants during the debate: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there and that’s what’s happening. … I’ve seen people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’” Shame on me for not being skeptical. Rottweilers are hard to swallow.

Crime is out of control, creating havoc in the lives of Americans who cannot afford to live in gated communities. The number of annual murders exceeds a whopping 20,000, while the corresponding number in England and Wales is a tiny 583. According to the U.S. Justice Department, in 2022 there were over 133,000 reported rape cases. A woman cannot leave her home anymore without trembling for her safety.

The American people are demanding an end to crime. They have recently ousted local prosecutors who were not paying attention. Neither Harris nor Trump has exhibited any ability to arrest the crime wave even though the answer is in plain view: Incarcerate the guilty to prevent recidivism.

What about homelessness destroying the American Dream and urban serenity? The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reports the number of homeless as approaching a staggering 700,000. They are a public nuisance, interfering with the use and enjoyment of public spaces by regular Americans. Neither Harris nor Trump unveiled granular plans to bring the blight of homelessness to an end.

In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a warrior’s warrior, warned against a military-industrial complex that would lead the nation into bankruptcy: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Eisenhower’s warning went unheeded. Even after running victory laps for winning the Cold War following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the military-industrial complex mushroomed into a multitrillion-dollar military-industrial-security enterprise eager for preemptive wars to destroy pre-embryonic threats of aggression against the U.S. (e.g., Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria or Afghanistan). The magnitude of military waste is unfathomable. The apocryphal tale of the $600 hammer is symbolic. The Pentagon itself — notwithstanding its conflict of interest — determined in 2015 that it could cut $125 billion from its budget over five years without feeling a pinch.

We spent more than $300 million every day for 20 successive years in Afghanistan, exceeding $2 trillion to restore an even more grisly, misogynistic Taliban. We helped to spark 9/11 by deploying 5,000 troops in Saudi Arabia near Islam’s two holiest places — Mecca and Medina — to defend Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from invasion by Iraq. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are monarchies that scorn American freedoms and profiteer off American consumers by artificially hiking oil prices. Iraq was a cost-free bulwark against Iranian hegemony in the Middle East until we turned it into an Iranian satellite in 2003.

Our annual national security spending now approximates $1.5 trillion, substantially more than 50% of all discretionary expenditures. Pointless military spending has fueled a national debt that has soared past $35 trillion and climbing. A policy of invincible self-defense eschewing racing abroad in search of beehives to crack open could be maintained with a fraction of our current national security extravagance.

The huge savings, if devoted to tax cuts, would spur the economy to untold heights. Unemployment would be a thing of the past. Yet there is not a dime’s worth of difference between Trump and Harris on national security. Both support our budget-busting roles as belligerents or cobelligerents in Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Gaza, Iraq and Ukraine on behalf of people whose loyalties are not with the U.S.

Let’s be serious. The fate of Ukraine is irrelevant to the national security of the U.S. How many times does the domino theory need to be discredited?

Finally, the American people do not want a king. They want balanced and measured government among the three branches to foil extremism — especially tough congressional oversight of executive operations. Yet neither Harris nor Trump has uttered a word about downsizing the White House, which has grown like topsy-turvy to replace the republic with an empire. Ponder this fact: The president now wields more unchecked power over the American people than King George III did over American colonists who provoked the American Revolution, playing prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to kill any person the president decrees could become a national security threat based on unsubstantiated speculation.

We desperately need candidates who put the interests of the American people above their personal ambitions. We need candidates who would rather be right than be president. Did either of the two on the debate stage fit that bill?

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