Column: Sure, Harris isn’t ideal. But Trump is a disgrace to America

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SACRAMENTO — Here’s my take on the painful 2024 presidential race. And I’ll keep it simple.

OK, call it simplistic. This absurd election season does lend itself to simple-minded thinking.

Mainly, what I don’t fully fathom is why any American could vote for an uncivil creep like Donald Trump.

Many may think they’re voting for a strongman, even though he is weak mentally.

Many clearly hate Democrats more than they love traditional American values involving decency.

Many — perhaps most — undoubtedly agree with Scott Jennings, a former top aide to President George W. Bush and now a conservative CNN political commentator.

Jennings wrote in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece Friday that he “nearly upchucked a time or two” riding “the Republican Party’s roller coaster” with Trump. But he’ll “vote for him one more time as a bulwark against the cultural and governance excesses of the American left.”

“Simply put, I’m more worried about the country’s future than any problems I’ve had with Trump in the past.”

I get the misgivings about lefty excesses. But I don’t understand why anyone would rate them worse than Trump’s despicable character and reward him with a second term as our president.

Reinstall him as the leader of this great country? A greatness he refuses to recognize and, instead, refers to the United States as the “garbage can for the world.”

Someone who habitually spews hate and insults at Latinos, Puerto Ricans, Haitians …women and Californians.

A vengeful bully who threatens to cut off federal disaster aid for California wildfires if the state doesn’t support his policies.

A wannabe authoritarian who says he’ll deploy the military against “the enemy from within,” a term he uses for political opponents.

I lost any respect for the guy when he mocked a New York Times reporter with a disability while running for president in 2016. Standing before TV cameras, Trump shuddered and stuttered, as if afflicted with palsy, making fun of the journalist whose articles he disliked. And he gets elected to be the nation’s role model for kids.

Here’s a pathological liar who speaks falsely about practically everything. Trump knows he lost the 2020 election but still can’t admit it — or that he incited an insurrectionist mob to storm the nation’s Capitol in a deadly effort to block Congress’ certification of the people’s vote.

If Trump truly believed he won that election, it would be even worse — the screwy emperor with no clothes.

This is unprecedented: A presidential candidate juries found to be liable for sexual abuse and guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records involving hush money to a porn star. Yet evangelical Christians worship him.

Someone who begins a campaign speech by glorifying the size of a famous golfer’s penis.

He brags about being buddies with communist dictators — including Russian President Vladimir Puti — and we’re going to elect him leader of the Free World?

An unhinged 78-year-old man who daily shows signs of losing mental agility. And he’s to be entrusted with our nuclear codes?

But mention these character and cognitive flaws to his supporters and they rationalize that life was better when Trump occupied the White House than it has been under President Biden.

There wasn’t inflation, they note. And that’s true. But the pandemic hadn’t yet taken its full toll on the economy. Biden and Congress did help fuel inflation by spending too much on giveaway incentives and infrastructure. But that actually started under Trump.

Russia hadn’t yet invaded Ukraine, crunching global supply lines and creating gasoline shortages that raised pump prices.

Illegal immigration was significantly reduced under Trump, but at the price of inhumanely yanking small children from their mothers’ arms and caging them.

Trump supporters tag Vice President Kamala Harris with partial blame for Biden’s mistakes, whether real or rubbish — the “Biden-Harris administration.” Never mind that a vice president has little responsibility or power over anything.

Unfortunately for Democrats and Harris, she has been awkwardly slow in distancing herself from Biden’s errors, particularly on border security.

She initially was handed the unofficial role of administration point person on illegal immigration and botched it. But she correctly notes that Senate negotiators reached a bipartisan agreement on immigration reform — and Trump persuaded congressional toadies to block the bill so he could run on the divisive issue. He selfishly put himself above the country. No surprise.

But regardless of any issue — foreign or domestic — none justifies placing a narcissistic, prevaricating con man in the Oval Office. Patriotic Americans shouldn’t lower themselves to that. Trump is unfit to lead.

Harris isn’t ideal. But she operates within the normal parameters of decency.

Democrats probably could have found a more saleable candidate — one distanced from Biden who had built a national base by winning votes in primaries. But the 81-year-old president stubbornly refused to acknowledge his physical and cognitive decline and didn’t bow out of the race until it was too late for the party to conduct a healthy replacement process.

Although a very late-starting candidate, Harris has exceeded many skeptics’ expectations — including mine — and has grown in the role.

The “San Francisco liberal” has run a good, energetic campaign, veering toward the ideological middle.

Sure, Harris muddles her responses to reporters’ questions she’s apparently afraid to answer directly. I wince.

But she out-debated Trump in the one faceoff that he had the courage to allow.

I’ll vote for Harris because she projects hope and is a normal human. Trump is a disgrace to America and the true enemy from within.

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Column: Sure, Harris isn’t ideal. But Trump is a disgrace to America

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