Kamala Harris' closing message: It's his record, stupid 

Americans are addicted to nostalgia. We want to believe in the good old days. Donald Trump has always understood this, it's why his slogan is "Make America Great Again."

With the election upon us — and the polls deadlocked — the urge to focus on all the crazy stuff that Trump says every day is understandable. It’s also a huge mistake. With Trump, as with any demagogue, it’s not his words that matter but his deeds.

The media — along with the Harris campaign — should be focused on reminding Americans of Trump’s terrible record as president. Unless you were an oil executive or a foreign oligarch, his administration was an abject failure, the worst in U.S. history according to historians.

Here’s a short list of those failures.

He made false promises. Remember “infrastructure week”? Remember how Trump was going to replace Obamacare with something better? Remember how he was going to build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it? None of those things happened, because Trump had little interest in actually governing.

He sopped the rich and hurt the poor. Trump pushed through was a massive tax cut that handed billions to the mega-wealthy and ballooned our deficit.

He faced one crisis and bungled it. As has been true all his life, Trump inherited prosperity—this time from the Obama administration. The only crisis he faced was the COVID-19 pandemic, which he treated it like a public relations problem, at first pretending it would magically go away, then contradicting health experts by offering idiotic press conferences in which he recommended that Americans inject bleach and take horse medicine. As a result of Trump’s mismanagement, COVID-19 killed more than 1.1 million Americans and tanked our economy. He left office with unemployment at record highs, our economy having lost more than 3 million jobs.

Most Americans experienced the Trump administration as a time of anger, illness and exhaustion. We felt stressed, almost constantly.

He took away women’s reproductive rights. Trump’s one “success” was appointing the conservative justices who helped overturn Roe vs. Wade, allowing states to strip women of their bodily autonomy. 

He stoked violence and division. Remember the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.?  The attacks on Muslims? How refugee children were separated from their parents and held in cages? Remember when he sicced the military on peaceful protestors to stage a photo op? Remember the mass shootings in Pittsburgh and El Paso and how both of the shooters were inspired by Trump’s rhetoric? Trump gets off on violence and bullying, and he inspires violence and bullying.

He was lazy and disinterested. Trump spent more time golfing than he did governing.

He chose insurrection over democracy. When, at last, Americans had had enough of Trump, and voted him out of office — by seven million ballots  and 72 electoral votes — he refused to concede defeat. Instead, he inspired a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, during which they beat on law enforcement officers and terrorized then Vice President Mike Pence.

This is just a short list, one that doesn’t include the way Trump kowtowed to dictators, sought to enrich himself and tried to politicize the Department of Justice.

All of these things happened, folks. Our Fourth Estate was there. They covered all these stories. Most Americans experienced the Trump administration as a time of anger, illness and exhaustion. We felt stressed, almost constantly. It wasn't great.

Harris seems to have settled on a closing argument that focuses on Trump’s increasingly menacing rhetoric. It is incumbent upon our free press to remind voters of Trump’s disastrous deeds as president. If we can’t summon the courage to face that history, we’re doomed to repeat it.

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