Shawdesh Desk:

BY WITHDRAWING his candidacy from the presidential election, president Biden has played a ‘president’s gambit,’ and he played it with extreme precision. He opened the platform for vice president Kamala Harris to step in and challenge the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.

Kamala Devi Harris, born on October 20, 1964, is the current 49th vice president of the United States.  She was a US Senator from California from 2017 to 2021 and the Attorney General of California from 2011 to 2017. As the vice president, she is constitutionally the right person to succeed the president if the president fails to perform his/her duty or dies. After Joe Biden supported her candidacy, she said that in her long career as a prosecutor, she has seen ‘Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.’ She took a swipe at Trump, who has a number of federal cases against him and has been found guilty in New York. By this Friday, informally, Harris has procured enough votes from the Democratic delegates to the National Convention, which will be held in Chicago from August 19 to 22, to become officially the presidential candidate for the Democratic party. Those who pleaded with Biden to withdraw his candidacy have supported her, including former president Obama.

And Republicans are freaking out. Republican strategist Karl Rove said this Friday that vice president Harris would grow the ‘momentum’ after the Democratic National Convention to leave Trump behind and forge ahead in the presidential race. This is a very remarkable development. On the other hand, Republican lawmakers who consider national security to be an important issue are moving away from Trump on key issues, including the war in Ukraine, preserving the NATO alliance, and protecting Taiwan from Chinese aggression. Furthermore, the Washington Post reported that 24 of 42 of Trump’s former cabinet members have expressed support, and the rest are against him.

It is very difficult to understand what Trump is saying because his speeches are laced with lies, half-truths, innuendoes and vulgar language. But Trump has plans if he becomes president again.

Two videos or documents circulated by Republicans can be taken as their blueprints or plans for the future. They are called Agenda 47 (series of videos) and Project 2025. The so-called Agenda 47 videos are available on the website; prudent journalists have summarised their messages. Here are some of them.

Trump would build 10 state-of-the-art ‘freedom cities’ on federal land and innovation hubs to achieve a ‘quantum leap in the American standard of living’, celebrate ‘an entire year of festivities across the nation’ from Memorial Day 2025 through July 4, 2026,  ‘honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence’, designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organisations and impose the death penalty on drug dealers and people traffickers;  pardon most of the rioters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the president; require police to enforce ‘stop-and-frisk,’ the practice of detaining and searching civilians for weapons and drugs; crackdown on doctors providing gender-affirming care to minors and ‘pink-haired communists’ pushing critical race theory or ‘inappropriate’ political material in schools; and by an executive order end a longstanding policy of granting citizenship to US-born children with undocumented parents.  And many more like these.

The Heritage Foundation created Project 2025, which included an advisory board consisting of more than 100 conservative groups. It is a 900-page guidebook to overhaul the federal government. It has four pillars, and the first one is abortion and social issues, but these issues have been completed by the US Supreme Court, which recently reversed the Row vs Wade verdict. The second pillar targets federal agencies, employees and policies. It says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be eliminated because it discusses environmental decay. Third, it proposes eliminating Homeland Security but creating a new department with 100,000 employees to tackle immigration. It also wants to axe US Agency for International Development staff and grantees that ‘engage in ideological agitation on behalf of the DEI agenda.’ DEI means diversity, equality and inclusion. Fourth, immigration recommends finishing the wall along the US-Mexico border and ‘taking a creative and aggressive approach’ to responding to drug cartels at the border. By the time they are implemented, the executive branch of the government will be gone.

These outlandish claims and plans make one wonder if these writings are of sane people. When confronted with this, Trump disavowed the initiative and wrote on social media that he knew nothing about Project 2025.

Kamala Harris, on July 25 this year, when speaking to the American Federation of Teachers, said, ‘Can you believe they put that thing in writing? Nine hundred pages in writing, Project 2025 is a plan to return America to a dark past.’

It would be a historic election in the history of the US for the survival of democracy.