Kamala Harris. Suddenly, there she was, in the spotlight. The obvious contender.

A chill wind seemed to slip along Joe Biden’s spine. It was a bitter pill to swallow. No one likes to feel that they are being shunted aside because of age, but neither can any of us resist the inexorable march of time. We are all dying. Where had he felt that creeping feeling before? He wasn’t sure. Or when? The clock was ticking. Tick tock. Tick tock.

Hickory clickory clock, the mouse ran up the sock. What was the next line? Something about the house falling down. Or maybe that was another song.

He looked at the time. Felt his leg. No evidence of a mouse there. He sighed. Decisions to be made. But what decisions?

Three weeks ago, I offered the opinion that someone would have to convince Joe Biden that there is no loss of dignity in handing over the torch. It was clear: the writing was on the wall. If Biden hung-on in there, all the polls suggested that, come election time in November, he was going to gift the keys of the White House to the corrupt, lying, narcissistic, thieving, venal, woman-hating megalomaniac that is Donald Trump.

I know: there is an argument that the polls could have been wrong. That, for example, they generally misread the demographic realities, with Republican voters dying and young Democrat-leaning voters getting on the register for the first time.

Throw in the fact that people switch allegiances far less than is often assumed, Joe glimmered briefly, and the situation may not have been as catastrophic – that was a word wasn’t it? – as had been trumpeted.

Trumpeted. That was worth a smile.

The counter view: you shouldn’t have to re-interpret the polls. If that’s the only life-line available, it isn’t enough. Every Presidential candidate has to have an aura of believability. They have to energise the people around them. They have to capture the imagination of voters who might otherwise stay at home. On all those measures, Joe Biden had become a liability.

He sat there. Jill had told him earlier that it wasn’t worth it. She was right. Imagine if it all went pear-shaped. The man who allowed – what was his name? – Vice President Trump to rule the world. Who enabled. Better word. He didn’t want that written on his monument. Headstone. Tombstone. Whatever it was called.

Have to get Jill to organise that. The inscription.

DESTINY CALLING

The clamour for Joe to step aside had started to sound like a Motörhead gig. It was a cacophony, turned up to eleven and a half. Donors were withholding money and letting the world know. Increasingly influential Democrats were signalling that it was time to call a halt. It can’t have helped Joe that he got a dose of Covid. He was doubtless feeling a lot less perky than usual – and he hadn’t exactly been scoring PBs on the perky-meter recently.

In fact, if it were the Olympic Games of world leaders, you’d have long downgraded expectations from winning a Bronze to assuming he’d be an also-ran among the also-rans. A loser among losers.

He remembered something that felt consequential. Donald Trump didn’t like losing. That was what he had said. It was still hard to believe. He didn’t like losing so he decided all on his own that he hadn’t. He tried to twist arms to overturn the result. Bullied public servants. Told one to ‘find’ the necessary votes. Accused Joe Biden of stealing the election. And then tried to steal it himself.

The slogan was a brazen lie. Stop The Steal. More like Start The Steal. It was hard to remember all the details now, but it came down to this. You couldn’t let the bastard win.

Over what must have been a lonely weekend, the U.S. President took stock. There was no way forward. That much was clear in his mind now. No loss of dignity in passing on the torch. He decided to call it quits and to endorse the current Vice President Kamala Harris as a replacement candidate for the Democrats.

There she was then, striding forward. Like she knew all along that it would come to this. Nothing premeditated, just destiny calling. As Rory Gallagher used to say at the start of a gig: “Let’s go to work.” And so she did…

AN EPIC BATTLE

The response since Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the Presidential contest has been a whirlwind. Trump .v. Biden was two old men failing to get to grips with one another in any meaningful way, but with Biden looking more likely to end up on the floor, defeated, out of sheer exhaustion and befuddlement.

The contest offered an easy platform for Trump to engage in a nasty stream of sledging, abusing his opponent for his frailties and concocting even more spoofs on the hoof, knowing that Biden no longer had the smarts to rebut them. He could dog whistle from one end of the week to the other, and lie like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the cookie jar – and know that he’d get away with it.

Now, all those gags about Biden’s fading mental faculties had become irrelevant. Crooked Joe was no more – not that he’d ever been crooked. Trump’s brand of effrontery would be mind-boggling if it weren’t so crass. Whatever your own worst nastinesses are, hook them onto the other guy first in a pre-emptive strike.

Trump knows he is so crooked he has to screw himself out of bed in the morning. Thus was the idea of Crooked Joe born, in the stew-pit of Trump’s twisted imagination. But even someone as flat-out brazen as Trump couldn’t just intone Crooked Kamala and think it’d stick.

In fact, an entire campaign’s worth of attack ads would have to be binned. Kamala Harris was young, vibrant and quick on her feet. She was out of the starting blocks like an Olympic sprinter, winning support across the board from anyone in the Democratic Party that counts. With his rambling, often incoherent stump speeches, Trump was now the one who’d look and sound clapped out. In his dotage.

Harris had momentum. She immediately closed the gap in polls to one per cent. Then she was neck and neck. Anyone with savvy knows that this might just be honeymoon stuff. The hard yards still have to be pounded. And the battle will be vicious, especially in the swing States.

In her opening salvoes Harris has been razor sharp. That’s encouraging. Based on her work as a courtroom prosecutor in California, she successfully characterised Trump as a predator, a fraudster and a cheat. She knew these people, she said. She pursued and faced them down. She was ready to take him on too.

She also went beyond the issue of personality. This is not just a battle to keep Donald Trump as far away from the Oval Office as possible; it is about the kind of country that the United States of America wants to be. It is about supporting people who are on the margins, including those who have been routinely discriminated against. It is about ensuring that minorities are treated equally under the law. It is about turning back the tide of corrosive measures, designed to corral and subjugate women – in particular by removing their right to control their own fertility.

It is about refusing to allow hard-won freedoms to be demolished. It is about taking a stand against the rancid, poisonous influence of Christian fundamentalism, including the control currently exerted over the U.S. Supreme Court by corrupt religious vested interests.

It is also about America’s position on the world stage and what it can contribute to creating a more just, equal, peaceful world. And it is about climate change, and the need to take decisive action to prevent the global meltdown that will inevitably be accelerated, if Trump and his fellow deniers get a hold, for a second time, of the levers of power.

It could be an epic battle. Now, however, it is one that Democrats have a chance of winning.

SMEAR CAMPAIGNS

The first few hours after Trump announced JD Vance as his Vice-Presidential running mate felt ominous. The money started to pour in from Silicon Valley. Vance, who used to work for PayPal founder Peter Thiel, fancies himself as a tech bro. A few tech bros fancy the promise of paying less tax under Trump. It looked like a marriage made in bro heaven.

A week later not so much so. The guy has more baggage than a carousel in Dublin Airport. And it contains toxic material.

Vance describes himself as a member of the post-liberal right. In practice, that means he is opposed to abortion, same-sex marriage and gun control – and for rich men getting richer. Women can stay at home and mind all those babies. He was raised Protestant, married a Hindu, Usha Chilukuri, but subsequently converted to Catholicism.

He isn’t just opposed to abortion. He is what in Ireland we called a SPUC-er. He is rabidly anti-choice. Even in cases of rape and incest, he wants to obliterate a woman’s right to choose. He presents himself as some kind of intellectual, but as late as 2022, he issued a warning that George Soros – a favourite obsession of anti-semitic, far right loonies – would be funding planes to transport black women across State lines to get abortions.

“That’s kinda creepy,” he said, extremely creepily.

In 2023, he signed-on to a letter urging the US Department of Justice to use the Comstock Act, a 19th Century anti-obscenity law to ban the mailing of abortion pills nationwide. The argument that this is still an appropriate vehicle on which to act in 2024 features in the increasingly notorious Project 2025, a dark vision – boiled down from old religious dogma by the Heritage Foundation ’think-tank’ – of where the vested interests behind Trump and Vance want to take America if the Republican candidate reclaims the White House.

Illustration: David Rooney

Not long ago Vance was a “never Trumper.” Now, he’s sucking up like there’s no tomorrow. It is a marriage of convenience. Vance has hoisted himself onto the Trump bandwagon, because he wants to be next in line when the dictator croaks. It is a pre-emptive power-grab.

But why did Trump pick someone who had been so hostile to him? As with so much of what Trump does, the answer is simple: money – and the possibility that the stupifying amounts of it available to him now will be the thing that wins him power for the second time.

Peter Thiel. Elon Musk. David Oliver Sacks. They all wrote large cheques. It is a massive power grab. And they will use every lever they have to come out on top.

They will pour funds into Trump’s coffers. That money will be used to push disinformation and smear campaigns. In the absurd atmosphere of U.S. politics right now, Trump can claim in a rally speech that abortions are being carried out even when ‘babies’ are full-term. And that clearly outrageous lie can be repeated and promoted across any and every social media channel, without any form of restraint whatsoever.

This they will do. Scruples are for liberals.

Money always shouted in U.S. politics – but we have now arrived at a dystopian place where a small number of billionaires feel that they can put the President of the United States in their pockets and fashion the world through their tech monopolies.

And one of the candidates is more than happy to play along.

WRITING ON THE WALL

At the heart of all this, of course, is misogyny. That is the fundamental ingredient in the hardcore hostility and hatred that religious fundamentalists harbour towards the idea of women being in control of their fertility and expressing themselves sexually.

These fundamentalists, and evangelicals, are being madly courted by Trump and Vance. For Trump, it is of course, the ultimate expression of the pure cynicism, greed and opportunism that fuels him in everything he does.

And so we hear him wheedling and pleading with these Christian proto-fascists to come out and vote in the Presidential election in November, just this once, because after that they won’t have to. “It’ll be fixed,” Trump declared – as close as you can get to a promise that he is aiming to establish himself as a dictatorial authoritarian Head of State, like Putin in Russia or Xi Jinping in China. Or maybe, more accurately, like a two-bit Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus.

Which is why Kamala Harris may yet prove to be the ideal candidate to galvanise those who foresee the imminent demolition of democratic rights in the USA, if Adolf Trump gets over the line for the second time. It is refreshing to see a clearly highly intelligent woman getting ready to face down the bullies, and the sexist thugs who think that it is fine for a celebrity or a politician to grab women by the pussy, just because you can.

I know. I’d like her to say right now that she will cease all arms sales to Israel. That she will join the international criminal court. That she will help to hunt Benjamin Natanyahu down and bring him to justice. That she will end the genocide. And insist that the land stolen in the West Bank by Israeli government and army-backed thieves must be returned.

But for now, securing the Democratic nomination and beating Trump are her primary goals. And maybe this is where Joe can come back into the frame, and finally do the right thing in relation to the genocide in Gaza.

A two-state solution would be a better legacy than being known forever as Genocide Joe.

IN THE SWIM

Meanwhile, back on this planet, we have seen some extraordinary performances by Irish athletes at the Olympic Games. In particular, so far at the time of writing, there was an imperious performance by Daniel Wiffen to land the gold medal in the 800m freestyle swimming.

That followed just two days after Mona McSharry had taken Ireland’s first medal – a bronze in the women’s 100m, secured brilliantly, by .01 of a second. There will likely be others, hopefully in rowing, boxing and athletics. But it is worth dwelling here for a moment on swimming.

This week, coinciding with Ireland’s greatest ever performance at the Olympics, the former Irish swimming coach Derry O’Rourke was in court. He had previously been found guilty on dozens of sexual assault charges, involving the abuse of 19 young girls between 1970 and 1992.

In a new case, dating back to 1989 and 1990, he was found guilty of raping and sexually assaulting a now 48 year-old woman when she was just thirteen years old. The sinister, selfish grubbiness and dishonesty of it all was made clear, when the woman gave evidence that he assaulted her under the guise of “checking her muscles.”

He also raped her on one occasion, following which she refused to go back to swimming. Later, she decided not to have children. “I never wanted to bring someone into this world to experience abuse, especially at the hands of someone they trusted, like I did,” she told the court, in a victim impact statement.

Here, I am reminded of Donald Trump and the sheer low-life gall of his attitude to women. And I am reminded that this is where the people who support Donald Trump and JD Vance want to take us – backwards to a world where women are stripped of their agency and can be used and abused and raped by men, as they have consistently been anywhere that is dominated by the three religions of Abraham. A world where the likes of Derry O’Rourke can pretend to check the muscles of 13 year old girls and get away with the rankest and most appalling levels of abuse. And then there was Eamon Casey…

Kamala Harrris must win. Let’s go to work…