Postcard from Washington D.C.

My annual weekend in Washington D.C. fell on the final weekend of campaigning in the Presidential election. By today it will all be over bar the counting.

Washington D.C. is a city completely in the grip of Harris-Walz mania. Every banner, button or shout-out is for Kamala Harris. MAGA hats sold in tourist shops next to Harris hats, purely for commercial reasons are the only reminder that Harris has an opponent.

The television news, at least the channels playing in the bars and hotel foyers, is wall-to-wall Harris propaganda. Kamala Harris is invariably shown smiling, waving and glad-handing an adoring public. Trump is rarely shown in action and is usually pictured looking glum and isolated.

The pro-Harris message could not be clearer. Any statistics that are shown refer to blue states where Harris is likely to win. Admittedly, the percentages were close in these, but I saw no reference to red states where Trump was likely to win.

I walked the length of Pennsylvania Avenue from a heavily fortified Capitol to the White House. There were stalls and gatherings everywhere, usually of middle-aged women sporting Harris t-shirts emblazoned with her inanities about women changing the world. Pink hair was much in evidence. There were very few men involved in these mini-rallies and those I saw were black. Such is the nature of intersectional politics.

As I approached the White House the gatherings were larger and noisier. They were not obtrusive, however, and I reckoned that this was because there was an implicit assumption that if you were in D.C. that weekend, you were a Harris supporter.

I asked a woman in my hotel foyer about her banners which she happily showed me. They carried more of Kamala’s vacuous utterances. The woman explained that she was for Harris, against Trump and especially against Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation document which is an agenda for the formation of a truly conservative administration.

I am sure that nothing in Project 2025 was to the liking of my hotel cohabitee, but it was especially odious to her that there were proposals to clamp down on trade unions, abolish overtime and widen the ban on abortion. She did not ask my views, and I did not volunteer them.

Last week a giant turd sculpture appeared on the Washington Mall, the purpose of which is to denigrate the protesters of January 6th who entered the Capitol and who, allegedly, left turds on desks and floors to mark their invasion. The giant turd is completely unofficial, but it has not been removed. Perhaps that would be a high priority for a Trump administration if he wins.

Readers of the Washington Post are upset, apparently, that it has not given its usual endorsement of one of the candidates. Presumably they would be furious if it had endorsed Trump. I was unable to ascertain the weekend coverage in the Post: no copies appeared to be on sale early on Sunday morning in Washington Reagan airport. But there were plenty of copies of the the New York Times (NYT) and it is not shy in endorsing Kamala Harris.

Rather, I should say that it is not shy in trying to demolish the candidature of Donald Trump. In fact, there is very little in the NYT about Harris. The entire Sunday edition, on the front page, in the opinion supplement and in the magazine is devoted to the sheer awfulness of Donald Trump.

A front-page column, decorated with a picture of Steve Bannon, opens on the theme of Trump and his allies using the same “subversive playbook” as four years ago to challenge “the false notion of a stolen election” result which he clearly feels will go against him, regardless of the vote. Project 2025 is dissected on the final two pages and its entrails laid out in such a way that the link between the policies it contains and those of key figures in Trump circles are made clear.

The second part of the main newspaper reports on the 230,000 volunteers enlisted by the Republicans as election monitors who, the article headline says, are not so much there to prevent fraud as to prove that it has taken place.

The second and third pages of the NYT always contains a series of soundbite columns offering fun facts and summaries of recent news. These two pages are remarkably free of anti-Trump propaganda. But one such column, Second Look, has a cartoon drawing of trees and chimneys pouring out smoke which obscures the tops of the trees.

The message is clear without reading the caption, which refers to how “many are anxious” about what will happen to the environment if Trump is elected and reverts to his environmental policy, which was to abolish most environmental policies in favour of a carbon fuelled industrial economy. It is reckoned that 100 environmental policies could be repealed, and the question is raised as to “where would the environment stand” after a Trump administration. No facts related to the environment are provided and the writer clearly confects a link between changes in environmental policy with actual change in the environment.

The opinion supplement is dedicated to the NYT’s editorial line but there is not a single article dedicated to the greatness of Kamala Harris. Rather, it is a diatribe against Trump and speaks of the fragility of democracy, how autocracy is on the cards at the election and to what people fear if Trump wins. Trump is portrayed as a Pol Pot like character without any of Pol Pot’s redeeming features.

The NYT magazine picks up the theme of the threat to democracy with a message to that effect on the cover page. Inside, all manner of concern is expressed by all manner of people about the prospect of a Trump government. The sheer one-sidedness and amnesia in the reporting in the NYT is staggering. While it is reported that challenging election results is very much a Trump trait they conveniently ignore the times when Democrats have likewise questioned election outcomes.

They also seem to ignore the fact that Trump is much stronger on rhetoric than action. The best way to judge someone’s likely actions is to look at his past record. Under the last Trump administration there were no mass deportations, unlike under his predecessor Barak Obama. Trump’s famous wall at the Mexican border went largely unbuilt. Trump is not perfect, and he may not be the best. But America cannot wait for the best; it may have to make do with better.

Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.