From my perspective, the top photograph encapsulates the way we vote. The picture is not AI generated or even edited; I took it with my iPhone. It shows a mirror in my apartment that faces my terrace, which looks out onto my city. It is a mixture of the “me,” “us,” and “them” that constitute the general trajectory of every political election. The collective weight that we put on each component determines the outcome. In the US we are now facing the presidential election, which has already started in some states and will be concluded on Election Day (November 5th).
A month and a half ago (July 30th), I wrote about the binary aspects of this election and about the global consequences that are derived from the extensive power that the American constitution grants the president, along with the central role that the US holds in the global well-being. It is true that not all countries and people are happy with the central role that the US plays in global affairs, and some are experimenting with steps that they can take to reduce this imbalance in power. However, very few are denying the magnitude of the US president’s role.
The July 30th blog was partially focused on the recent major change that took place in the coming US presidential election: the withdrawal of President Biden from the candidacy for a second term and his replacement by VP Kamala Harris. As was mentioned there, the replacement completely changed the dynamics of the election. A week ago, the first, and most likely last debate (ex-president Trump just announced that he will not be part of a second debate) between the two candidates, took place. The last statistics that I saw reported a TV audience of 67 million people that watched either all or part of the debate. I was one of them. I didn’t find any direct references about the number of people outside the US that watched, but there was plenty of coverage from foreign responses. The NYT got a few insiders’ opinions about various aspects of the debate. I am cherry-picking one of them below:
Binyamin Appelbaum Trump kept describing the United States as a failing nation. His candidacy remains the best evidence for that claim. The Republican candidate for president of the United States baldly asserted on national television that doctors are executing babies after birth. He said that immigrants are stealing and eating Americans’ pet dogs and cats. He defended the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. Even if he loses the election, this debate was a reminder — though, frankly, one we didn’t need — that our democracy has big problems.
The first sentence of Appelbaum’s response was a derivative of President Reagan’s famous line from his 1980 presidential debate: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” VP Harris went around the question, trying to circumvent any conflicts with President Biden, instead describing her middle-class background. Appelbaum, on the other hand, is citing Trump’s statement that the US is currently a failing nation—as opposed to how it was when he was president (he was elected in November 2016 and failed to be reelected for a second term). This contradicts a recent report, which ranked the US as the third best country in the world, following Switzerland and Japan based on a variety of attributes, divided into the categories of Adventure, Agility, Cultural Influence, Entrepreneurship, Heritage, Movers, Open for Business, Power, Quality of Life, and Social Purpose.(Best Countries in the World | U.S. News). VP Harris returned to this issue of a supposedly failing nation later in the debate by mentioning that he was fired by 81 million people (not reelected).
The wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Hamas and Israel were mentioned, with Trump making the claim that if he had been the president, these wars would have never started because he would have made deals with both sides. This is obviously a claim that cannot be tested.
Real world present events such as hurricane Francine were threatening the Gulf Coast at the time of the debate but the candidates were never asked how they would treat such extreme weather events, which are projected to amplify over the next four years. Climate change was an explicit question that they were asked about, but both avoided it completely and shifted their answers to speak instead about the car industry. One global threat that was mentioned a few times by President Trump in connection with the Russia-Ukraine war, was the threat of WWIII. I wrote about it in two previous blogs (December 29, 2020 and March 22, 2022). But the situation has become dearer now because Ukraine has started to counter the non-stop Russian bombardments of its country by bombing Russian territories across its border. One recent target was the city of Belgorod:
The Russian authorities said on Saturday that a Ukrainian attack on the city of Belgorod had killed at least 22 people and injured nearly 110 others, in what would be the deadliest single assault against a Russian city since the start of the war nearly two years ago. Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that Ukraine had hit Belgorod — a regional center of around 330,000 residents about 25 miles north of the Ukrainian border — with two missiles and several rockets, adding that the strike was “indiscriminate.”
I wrote about the city of Belgorod in my 2020 and 2022 blogs that I previously mentioned. To most Americans, it is a city like any other; not to Russians. As was mentioned in the 2020 blog, this city was formerly named Stalingrad. The history of WWII cannot be told without mentioning this name, which marked the start of a reversal of the Nazi Germany military successes—at the price of hundreds of thousands of Russian and German casualties. Bombing this city means targeting a source of deep-rooted Russian pride. Meanwhile, Russia is the country most heavily equipped with nuclear weapons, as I described in the 2022 blog. The nuclear risk that this entails is described on Wikipedia.
In the debate, President Trump didn’t try to address how he would handle this explosive situation. He just mentioned the threat to indicate that it wouldn’t have existed if he had won the 2020 election.
Going back to the opening photograph, the personal part of the election will be different for each of us. For those of us who live from paycheck to paycheck or are out of work, the main criteria for choosing a candidate might be the help that they promise a given group or a specific state. For those of us who are better off, the projected taxation rates will be the key issue. However, the view of the NYC Harbor in the photograph should remind us that threats such as climate change and nuclear war are threats to all of us. We will all be better off if we elect a president not only based on the promises that they make but on our perception of how they will navigate the ship of the Union through the unpredictable storming seas—both figurative and literal—that will threaten all of us.
