RUTHFULLY YOURS

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly in recent weeks, Kamala Harris’s substanceless presidential campaign has been a deranging, quasi-psychedelic experience, like watching the everyday physical reality you previously took for granted simply melt into fractal trails of pastel-colored candy floss. So picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies as I take you down to America’s political strawberry fields, where nothing is real and there’s nothing to get hung about — and where Harris’s campaign has now simply decided to steal policy positions from Donald Trump’s campaign because, hey, haven’t you heard? It’s a “vibes” election now, friend! And the vibes will make a sober man seasick.

The first example of the Harris campaign’s capsizing reality — as discussed at length on Friday — was her sudden rebranding as a “border hawk” — rewriting her history while tellingly never once promising to either stop or reverse the flow of illegals pouring over the southern border. This weekend? It was Kamala in Nevada (a swing state whose hinge is the service-worker-based casino industry) promising to end taxes on tips.

I assume others here will write about the policy implications of this fantasy proposal with greater intelligence than I am capable of mustering anymore. Honestly, it sounds like a terrible idea to me, and a transparent giveaway to secure the electoral votes of Nevada alone, which (pace, alas, Jon Ralston) does not matter all that much in terms of 2024’s electoral calculus. In fact, I said as much back when Trump himself first proposed it in Las Vegas, joking that from Trump’s perspective it was probably just a way to further ingratiate himself with exotic dancers.

So now, my instinctive reaction to Kamala’s taking Trump’s bad idea and proudly pronouncing it her own is, of course, to act like Sam Neill awakening to find himself on blue-tinted Greyhound bus in the film In The Mouth of Madness. (Sample quote: “AAAAH! AAAAAAHHHH!!”). If you take the campaigns at their word — quite the ask these days — then the Republican and Democratic Parties seem to be verging closer and closer to running on the same platform: The only difference is that one is coded “Kamala” and is jazzy, snazzy, and media-approved, while the other is coded “Trump” and thus betokens Democracy Dying in Darkness.

Since I’m trying to make my peace with unreality these days, I want to quickly point out the primary reason why Harris’s new position is a special sort of farce. (The secondary reason is, of course, the media coverage of it.) Harris’s lone vote is what got the IRS’s nose into heavily monitoring tips for taxable funds in the first place. In 2022, Joe Biden was desperate to pass his signature piece of legislation, the appropriately misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. As part of the sale to make the fantasy numbers even out in what — despite its name — was an enormous giveaway to select classes of voters and lobbying groups, the legislation granted $80 billion in additional funding to the IRS’s budget to allow it to explore new means of revenue-raising and tax enforcement. It promptly responded, in January 2023, with the nominally voluntary Service Industry Tips Compliance Agreement, which replaced earlier, failed attempts to trace taxable tips (like EmTrac and TRDA) and announced the federal government’s crackdown on Jenny, the server at your local Applebee’s — this time via electronic documentation at point of sale.

Kamala Harris was, of course, the tiebreaker in her official role as president of the U.S. Senate in a 51–50 vote on the Inflation Reduction Act. She personally cast the vote that funded and thus brought into existence the tax regime she now claims to oppose. Will she offer so much as an “Oops!” by way of explanation as she now doubles back? I doubt it. I doubt, in fact, that she ever read the legislation she cast a vote for as Joe Biden’s vice president, or even the executive summary for that matter. She wasn’t being asked to think, after all — she never has been. She voted for it because she was told to; the simple brute requirements of partisanship meant she would do meekly as she was ordered and support a Democratic bill no matter what was in it. Some might sympathize with such a hapless plight. (I do not.) It remains her record regardless, and now she has simply turned her back on it — while simultaneously vulturing her opponent’s campaign plank from him — without a word of explanation about why she changed her mind.

Can Harris continue to get away with such wholesale hypocrisies without fielding questions about her own personal responsibility? Her campaign sure seems to think so — social media demand it, after all, and the mainstream media clearly now feel content to assign one person per outlet to write a vaguely chin-scratching piece disapproving of the complete contrivance and artificiality of Kamala’s cocoon while letting the rest of the newsroom float her campaign aloft to victory on the rising tide of their own enthusiasm.

But I retain my doubts, doubts which I held on the day she became the de facto Democratic nominee and which I cling to the way a sailor grips a plank of shipwrecked driftwood waiting for the ninth wave. In fact, I want to end yet another piece of seasick despair on a more hopeful note. I think the Harris campaign’s hubris is dangerously on the verge of breeding nemesis. This sort of shameless theft (theft of a bad idea, I will reiterate) reinforces a preexisting belief about Harris, the shadowy cabal that pulls her strings, and the media promoting it all. Her people are getting ever more arrogant and high-handed; the counter-force inevitably awaits.

That nemesis may not strike her so much as her media collaborators, however. In a seemingly unrelated incident, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins made an appearance last night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. (The show has lost all cultural relevance and is now a threadbare political propaganda mill, alas — Letterman’s legacy deserved better.) As Collins was talking, Colbert interjected, as if to bolster her credibility: “I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is —” and the audience would not allow Colbert to finish his sentence as it descended into peals of sarcastic laughter. He meant it sincerely, and they took it as an obvious joke whose punch line was “Of course you all are shameless partisan hacks.” Colbert grimaces at the unintended response and insists on correcting the audience (“That wasn’t supposed to be, uh . . . ”) before realizing that he accidentally revealed to the world that not even his own viewers are willing to board his ship of fools. Which makes one wonder — is it really America that has gone crazy, or merely America’s media class?