With the Algarve – Chega!, an ultra-nationalist party, won an unprecedented five seats in the Faro district at the general election earlier this year -, Portugal in general and much of Europe, with the exception of Britain’s Keir Starmer-led ‘Champaign Socialists’ and France – the latter still teetering on the abyss -, taking a drastic turn to the political right on the back of austerity and immigration issues, the world is now holding its breath while the US two-way fight for power between the incumbent Democrats and their Republican challengers, culminating in ballot box day on November 5, unfolds.
Since 19th-century maverick cartoonist Thomas Nast penned cartoons in the American press depicting the Democratic Party as donkeys as opposed to the Republicans’ elephants, those labels have stuck.
A few months ago, realising that their political fortunes had struck quicksand on the tottering feet of increasingly forgetful still-President ‘Sleepy’ Joe Biden, the Democrats switched candidates in mid-race, dumping their ‘donkey’ Biden in favour hitherto dark horse Kamala Harris.
A so-called live TV debate between the bumbling President and his bullying tormentor, ‘elephant in a china shop’ Donald Trump, spelt the end for long-serving Joe to further ambitions and prompted the relatively inexperienced Vice President Harris to take up the baton.
Kamala Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both immigrants to the US. Now a youthful 59-year-old, she was born in Oakland, California.
After graduating from Howard University and the University of California, she began her law career in the office of the district attorney of Alameda County, then was recruited to the San Francisco DA’s Office and later the office of the city attorney of San Francisco. She was elected DA of San Francisco in 2003 and attorney general of California in 2010, and reelected as attorney general in 2014.
She was the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American to hold each of those offices. Harris was the junior US senator from California from 2017 to 2021 before accepting her present office.
Upon being confirmed as her party’s new presidential candidate, Kamala Harris managed to more than make up for the Biden humiliation in a new September 10 televised debate, using her oratory skills honed in her previous role as district attorney to provoke and ridicule many ill-considered Trump outbursts and subsequently taking the lead in national opinion polls for the first time.
Trump, still claiming he had won the face-off, unsurprisingly declined to meet her again on television at a future date, however. He also claimed that the debate was “rigged”. Harris then consolidated her position with her solid choice of running mate, Tim Walz. The 60-year-old former schoolteacher and retired United States Army non-commissioned officer has served as the 41st governor of Minnesota since 2019.
Walz is regarded as a homely, straight-talking family man and is credited with first describing Donald Trump and other Republicans as “weird”. The term subsequently became a popular meme, especially with young people, and has since entered common usage. So much for the ‘good guys’ – let us now take a closer look at the opposition.
Donald Trump is no stranger to the big stage, of course – or controversy. The now 78-year-old former President, already notorious for his extreme views on anything ranging from the Corona virus, immigration to fixed elections as well as inciting the storming of the White House in 2021, tax evasion trials and extra-marital affairs, nonetheless has managed to retain his vice-like grip on die-hard Republicans.
His current messiah-like status amongst the party faithful has been enhanced by two recent albeit failed assassination attempts which have done little to dampen his often-outrageous rhetoric.
Going back to the last TV debate, Trump at one point claimed that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were abducting and eating family pets. “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he shouted. Harris called Trump “extreme” and laughed after his comments which have since gone viral.
Officials quickly contradicted Trump, confirming that there is no evidence that Haitian immigrants in the Springfield community are doing that.
Equally appalled was Taylor Swift. “Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” she wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for Kamala Harris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.” She signed her post as ‘Childless Cat Lady’, a reference to comments made by Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio – more of him below -, about women without children.
The photo that accompanied her post showed her holding a furry feline, Benjamin Button, her pet Ragdoll. Trump promptly panned pop megastar Swift for endorsing Harris shortly afterwards, saying: “I was not a Taylor Swift fan … she’s a very liberal person. She seems to always endorse a Democrat, and she’ll probably pay a price for it in the marketplace.”
Never one to let an opportunity slip, he then turned on Harris. “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Current British Foreign Secretary David Lammy branded Trump a woman-hating “neo-Nazi”, “tyrant in a toupee” – and Lammy, the son of Guyanese immigrants and the first black Briton to study at Havard Law School, should know what he is talking about.
But back to the Trump camp and the aforementioned Republican vice presidential running mate. James David “JD” Vance has been described as a national conservative and right-wing populist. He sees himself as a member of the post-liberal right, his political positions including opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, and gun control.
Vance is an outspoken critic of childlessness, linking it to sociopathy and advocating that parents have more voting power than non-parents. He suggests the right wing should use state power to re-staff institutions with ideological allies who “actually take a side in the culture war”.
The Washington Post called Vance the “voice of the Rust Belt” while The New Republic criticized him as “liberal media’s favorite white trash-splainer” and the “false prophet of blue America”.
Strangely enough, in 2016, Vance was an outspoken critic of then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, calling Trump “reprehensible” and “America’s Hitler” and himself a “never Trump guy”. In 2021, after Vance registered his Senate candidacy, he publicly announced support for Trump, apologizing for his past criticisms – obviously a match made in heaven … or hell.
Completing the demonic triumphate is one-time Democrat and then independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Junior who endorsed Trump following his own withdrawal from the race. The 70-year-old son of assassinated former US Attorney General John F Kennedy’s five siblings condemned the endorsement: “Our brother Bobby’s decision is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
True to family tradition, RFK’s – as he’s known – second marriage to Mary Richardson was marred by his sending explicit nude photos of women to friends that they presumed he had taken. He reportedly engaged in multiple affairs during the marriage and his friends later called him a “lifelong philanderer”.
Kennedy filed for divorce from Richardson and, not long after, she was found dead in a building on the grounds of her home in Bedford, New York. The Westchester County Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide due to asphyxiation from hanging. Before her death, Richardson had discovered her husband’s personal journal, in which he recorded sexual encounters with 37 different women.
Kennedy began experiencing severe short- and long-term memory loss and mental fog which he attributed to “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”, as well as to mercury poisoning from eating large quantities of tuna fish. In July 2024, an image of Kennedy holding a charred animal carcass captured in 2010 surfaced in a Vanity Fair story, which alleged that the carcass belonged to a dog and that Kennedy ate it – not Haitians! Kennedy denied that he ate dog meat, and said the animal carcass in the picture was a goat.
In August 2024, Kennedy released a video on Twitter featuring Roseanne Barr, acknowledging that, in October 2014, he placed a dead six-month-old bear in Central Park after initially planning to skin it for meat. Kennedy claimed that the bear had been hit by a car in front of him and that he ultimately abandoned the carcass for fear that it would spoil before he could preserve it, deliberately positioning the body to give the impression that it had been struck by a cyclist in Central Park.
In a 2012 interview with Town & Country magazine, Kennedy’s daughter Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy – recently romantically linked with Ben Affleck – recounted a story about how her father used a chainsaw to sever the head of a dead beached whale in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, then used bungee cords to strap the whale’s head to the top of their minivan for the five-hour drive home, saying “every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car” and that they “had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has accused Kamala Harris of hating Israel and that the Jewish state would not exist “within two years from now” if she became the president of the US. Trump asserted that the Israel-Hamas war would have never started if he had been president. “She wouldn’t even meet with Netanyahu when he went to Congress to make a very important speech. She refused to be there because she was at a sorority party of hers. She hates Israel,” Trump said. “American Jews that vote for her need to have their heads examined.”
In my opinion, anyone voting for Trump, Vance or acknowledge the maverick support of RFK Junior come November 5 need to have their heads looked at – “bring it on,” as Kamala says – or emigrate to Portugal!
By Skip Bandele
|| features@algarveresident.com
Skip Bandele escaped to the Algarve almost 25 years ago and has been with the Algarve Resident since 2003. His writing reflects views and opinions formed while living in Africa, Germany and England as well as Portugal.
