Ron Unz on “Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and the Tottering American Empire”

Ron Unz, editor and publisher of the Unz Review, discusses “Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and the Tottering American Empire.” a useful summary of ongoing ever-more-bizarre developments in American politics.  We’ll compare notes on the “Trump shooting” in Butler, Pennsylvania, an issue we sharply disagree on. The likelihood of a major escalation on the West Asian front, in the wake of Israel’s assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh and Fouad Shukur, will also be on the agenda.

Excerpts:

So yeah, things are not getting any less weird by the week, are they?

It's just a very strange time in American politics right now.

It certainly is. And the month of July may actually go down in history books as one of the stranger months in presidential politics, won't it?

Look, we had—there was a very suspicious assassination attempt against Donald Trump, who was leading in the polls. One of the main presidential candidates and a former president. And he came very close to dying in that assassination attempt, according to all the news media reports. And just a few days afterwards, his opponent, incumbent President Joseph Biden, was suddenly forced to leave the race, being replaced by his vice president.

There's never been a case before of somebody winning 99% of the primary delegates and then being forced out of the race by the donors and political operatives in his own party.

One of the aspects of your article that some might push back against would be: They would say, well, that's true, Ron. It seems very undemocratic that Biden would get virtually all the primary votes and then the donors and oligarchs would just force him out. However, the polls show that everybody approves of that, that all the Democrats almost unanimously approve of the oligarchs doing this to them. So what does that tell you about the voters?

Well, I mean, it basically shows, you know, that certainly would be the case. For example, if another candidate had simply been picked by fiat and if the media, the Democratic leading media, had all endorsed that choice, I think it's very possible that most of the democratic-leaning public would have supported it.

The truth is, Kamala Harris was an extremely unsuccessful presidential candidate when she ran. One of the points I made in my article was that when she ran for the nomination— she'd been elected U.S. Senator from the state of California—she checked off every diversitarian box. She's half South Asian, half Caribbean black. Her husband is Jewish. And so she ended up being regarded as one of the leading presidential candidates on the Democratic side in the primaries. She raised $43 million. She was one of the strongest fundraisers except for Bernie Sanders. And yet she did so badly with the actual voters in the Democratic primaries that she ended up dropping out of the race before the first vote was cast in Iowa, and got zero delegates.

So in other words, she clearly ran the most unsuccessful presidential campaign in American history. But again, the donors and the operatives then persuaded Biden to put her on the ticket. And that's why she's vice president and might end up being president in another few months.

It is all very strange. But again, for me, the strangest part is the acquiescence of the public, especially the Democrats that don't seem to have that much of a problem with it. Of course, there are so many things that they should have problems with that they don't. But how do you explain that? Kamala Harris has never been very popular. As you pointed out, her campaign was a complete fiasco. Nobody particularly liked her as vice president, including the Democrats. But now the polls seem to be showing that the people are not up in arms about this, to say the least. So do you think the media is succeeding in spinning this in such a way that they're basically bringing people on board with what they're doing?

I mean, that's certainly an aspect of it. The other thing is also Joseph Biden was an extremely unpopular president and was widely regarded as likely to lose to Donald Trump. A lot of people think that the reason he was kept on the ballot for the primaries, even though he was so unpopular and based on his debate performance and other statements since then really lost most of his mental facilities, was to prevent any open debate in the Democratic primaries.

So much of the Democratic base, the primary electorate, is so outraged with the position of the Biden administration on the Middle East, on the Israel-Gaza conflict, that if Biden had not been involved in the race as the incumbent, there might have been a very sharply contested battle among several candidates, one or two of which might have decided to go for the support of the base of the party by coming out with a different Middle Eastern policy.

So the Democratic Party apparatus, the donor class, the political operatives decided to sort of drag Biden across the finish line, since as the incumbent president, he would probably be able to win nearly all of the delegates, which is exactly what happened. And certainly it would be very unlikely that any prominent Democrats would enter the race against him, which is exactly what happened. And so once he'd accomplished that goal of preventing an open debate in the Democratic presidential primaries, they decided basically to get rid of him and put in somebody else instead.

It's just a very strange thing when you have the choice of the Democratic Party being somebody who received no votes in the primaries, just sort of was put in there. And Kamala Harris is making a few noises of objection to the current Middle Eastern policy of the administration of which she's a part. But there's a lot of skepticism whether she would actually implement any of those changes if she were elected….

It's interesting also, isn't it, the role that the Trump assassination attempt—or as I would say, the alleged Trump assassination attempt, because you and I have quite different views of that—played in this. Obviously, it gave the Democrats the excuse to knock Biden off the ticket, to finally dispose of him, as we assume they probably were planning to do anyway. But it would have been harder if they now didn't have this situation where Trump is posing with an Iwo Jima PR shot so it looks like he's basically been minted as the next president. So there's no way they're going to beat him now (with Biden). So they certainly have to drag Biden off the stage in the wake of that shooting, and the shooting played a very strange role in this.

But regarding the Trump shooting issue, obviously there are all sorts of very, very strange things about it. One can see it as a genuine shooting. We can take the official story at face value and say that the shooter got incredibly lucky due to outrageous Secret Service incompetence, and that Trump got incredibly lucky, because not just by being missed by the bullet, but by having the bullet do exactly the best possible thing that it could for Trump's political fortunes and indeed for his staying alive, giving him a perfect PR op. It couldn't have possibly worked out better for Trump.

And so we can look at this as the shooter getting incredibly lucky, the Secret Service getting incredibly unlucky or incompetent, and Trump getting luckiest of all. Or we can scratch our heads and say there's something fishy going on here. Maybe it was a real professional assassination attempt. Maybe there was another shooter somewhere who was supposed to finish the job. But if so, why didn't he?

But my analysis, as you know, which you disagree with, is that if we look at it from the “who benefits” standpoint and then sort of reverse engineer it, what we get is the strong possibility that the pro-Trump side—people who would like Trump to be in office and indeed to survive to be in office— would arrange such an apparent assassination attempt for that purpose. And I'm looking for a way for someone to prove that that's not the case, to falsify that hypothesis.

And I haven't yet seen it fully falsified. You've made reasonable arguments, but they're all kind of a priori arguments. And so give me the best argument against my hypothesis.

Well, again, first of all, I'm not at all convinced that there was any sort of conspiracy. In other words, probably I'd lean towards the official story being true. But as a secondary possibility, say one in three chance, I think there might very well have been a conspiracy…

(Listen to the interview, see who you think won the argument, and drop a comment!)

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