Brace yourselves for President Harris

Although the electors for the presidential election of 2020 do not cast their votes until December 14, and their votes are not certified — and hence the election is not officially ratified — until December 23, it is eminently possible that by the time you read this the world will know whether the election was won by Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

That is emphatically not the case now, in mid-November. The media narrative would have you believe otherwise. According to the received script, Biden won on November 3, or at least in the wee hours of November 4, when mail-in ballots, tens of thousands of them, began appearing like manna from heaven. By November 7, the media, like the Biden campaign itself, could contain themselves no longer and began their incontinent chant proclaiming Biden ‘President-elect’. His handlers even invented a new office, ‘Office of the President Elect, just for Joe.

At least 72 million people voted for Donald Trump. Those framing The Narrative thought Trump voters would not notice that Biden was being hailed as the next president even though the President had not yet conceded and seven major states had not completed counting their votes. They thought that no one would care that Josh Shapiro, the attorney general of Pennsylvania and an avid Democratic partisan, promised a few days before the election that Trump would lose the vote in his state. How did he know? The Committee for the Preservation of the Narrative at first ignored, then dismissed, and as of this writing is loudly denouncing the mounting reports of widespread voter abuse.

At a State Department press conference on November 10, Mike Pompeo gave everyone a little thrill when he assured listeners that there would be a ‘smooth transition to a second Trump administration’. He said it with a twinkle in his eye but of course the propaganda arm of the Democratic People’s Republic went nuts. This is dangerous talk, they said.

But let’s be frank. Recounts and legal challenges to elections seldom succeed. It is uphill work for Trump. The pressure on him to concede is huge. But so far Trump is pushing ahead vigorously. The Republican party is solidly behind him. As is his base. The Trump administration has filed scores of lawsuits in the swing states. Will he prevail? No one, not even the geniuses at CNN or the New York Times, knows. This is a topsy-turvy year. As I write, he’s just won North Carolina.

Still, it is not too early to speculate about what a Joe Biden administration would look like. In domestic policy, he would overturn Trump’s attack on onerous and counterproductive regulation. The regulatory state would be back in business. Fired by the ‘woke’ agenda of identity politics and political correctness, Biden would bring government scrutiny back into education and the business world. Racial and sexual quotas for hiring and advancement would once again be the flavor of the week. The Trump administration recently banned the teaching of critical race theory — at whose center is the proposition that all whites are racist — from federal agencies. Biden would overturn that prohibition.

Although Biden waffled late in the campaign about fracking, he is on record supporting the ‘Green New Deal’. It would not be long before he banned fracking on federal lands and imposed insupportable taxes on coal. The Trump administration made America energy independent for the first time in decades. Biden would put an end to that.

He has also promised to abolish the Trump tax cuts, which brought the American corporate tax rate down to 21 percent and benefited about 85 percent of individual tax filers.

He would renew the Bush-Obama globalist trade policies, and would drop the tariffs on Chinese goods and the hawkish posture towards China’s hegemonic ambitions in the South China Sea and elsewhere. Trump brokered historic peace deals in the Middle East. Biden would turn his back on Israel and renew relations with Iran.

One of Trump’s signature issues is immigration. He has reduced the torrent of illegal immigration by more than 90 percent. Biden would reopen the floodgates. With respect to Europe, Biden’s allegiance would be with the European Union, not the spirit of Brexit, which stresses the importance of national sovereignty and political accountability.

Having been in politics for 47 years, the 78-year-old Biden is a creature of the Swamp, the administrative state apparat that is staffed by career bureaucrats. Should the Democrats also take the Senate, it is likely that they would move to expand the Supreme Court, thus destroying the separation of powers that stands at the center of our form of government and transforming the court into a kind of super-legislative body.

In short, Biden would complete the ‘fundamental transformation of the United States of America’ that Barack Obama began but did not have time to complete. There would still be a place called ‘America’, but it would no longer be a constitutional republic dedicated to limited government and individual liberty.

I say that Biden would do all this, but it is no secret that what was done would be done in his name but really not under his direction. Joe Biden is a sadly diminished man, past the threshold of senility, and a Biden administration would mutate quickly into a Kamala Harris administration. Harris, perhaps the mostly cordially disliked Democratic candidate during the primary, won no delegates and had to drop out of the race early. But she occupies an eyrie on the far left of the Democratic party. Within months, it could be Harris at the helm, and she would pursue all the policies I have outlined here but on steroids and with a vigor that is as uncompromising as it is venomous.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 2020 US edition.