Seldom will voters in any presidential election have both a chance to make history and get a clearer and more obvious choice between candidates than in the upcoming one between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Harris espouses a host of positive values regarding the future. She’s been an outstanding state attorney general, senator, and Vice President. She would be the first Black and Asian woman president and the first HBCU woman graduate to hold that office.
But most importantly, she’s an advocate for progress, someone interested in the plight of the entire nation, and not totally consumed with personal profit and corporate expansion. Harris understands there are problems with immigration but doesn’t think you solve them by scapegoating people from other nations with barely coded racist rhetoric. She understands people are concerned about crime and safety, but also don’t want police operating without restraint and concern for the rights of citizens. She doesn’t see anything wrong with sensible restrictions on guns in an era when gun violence has escalated, and illegal weapons are far too easy to obtain.
By contrast, her opponent is a disciple of insult politics and a xenophobic, narcissistic, revenge-based approach to public policy. He’s already said he plans to pardon all participants in the attempted Jan. 6 coup. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he continues to maintain he won the 2020 election, and his cronies in the Trump party (it really shouldn’t even be called the Republican Party at this stage) are out in states across the nation doing all they can to suppress voting among any group they consider hostile to his efforts. Over the eight years his specter has loomed over national politics we’ve seen a huge increase in hate speech and bigoted attacks throughout the country, sadly lots of that behavior in Tennessee where Neo-Nazis have felt empowered to march downtown and even terrorize children.
The time has come to purge the stench of Trumpism from American political discourse. It’s no surprise many intelligent people who aren’t Democrats are turning away from the party they’ve embraced their entire adult lives because they’re sickened by what it has become. A prime example is Adam Kinzinger, the kind of person who epitomized being a Republican prior to Trump. A Lt. Colonel in the Air National Guard who also piloted missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kinzinger served in Congress as an Illinois Representative from 2011 to 2023.
But after the 2020 election, he rejected Trump’s claims of a stolen election. He not only was appalled by the events of Jan. 6 but voted to impeach. Kinzinger later served on the House Select Committee to investigate the Capitol attack. Trump and his flunkies placed a target on his back, and Kinzinger did not run for reelection in 2022. But he’s one of many Republicans who have had their fill of Trump’s garbage. He took the microphone on Aug. 15 to tell an audience of 20 million primetime viewers watching the Democratic National Convention exactly who Donald Trump is and what another Trump administration would mean. “Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong; he is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim.” He also added perhaps the key phrase for lots of folks trying to claim Trump is espousing “conservative views.” “The Republican Party is no longer conservative. It has switched its allegiance from the principles that gave it purpose to a man whose only purpose is himself.”
Most news outlets carried Kinzinger’s complete message, though Fox News chose to cut away from it. However, it’s clear from listening to him and others like Liz Cheney that anyone with any element of integrity or principle within the GOP has had their fill of Trump. He’s still facing countless charges in multiple states but hopes to eliminate all legal issues by winning the presidency. If someone were to propose a television show about a man who runs for the White House to stay out of jail, that concept would be widely viewed as outlandish and ridiculous. But that’s exactly what’s happening this year, and far too many people are sanctioning this perversion of the electoral process by a habitual liar and convicted felon.
The Tennessee Tribune fully and totally endorses Kamala Harris for president, and urges all voters who want sanity, decorum, and a focus on issues rather than theatrics and name-calling will go to the polls in November and keep Donald Trump out of the White House again.
