The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

A friend here in Washington keeps close tabs on the US and its upcoming big election. She watches cable TV and she also reads some big American newspapers online and looks at The Economist, a British publication that may offer greater insight than many American news outlets. All things considered, she is up to date.

And, she thinks Donald Trump will absolutely win re-election in less than two weeks. Why? For the past year, she has been consistent in her rationale.

“I believe that Americans actually approve and agree with Donald Trump’s policies more than they don’t agree,” she said. “Sure, many folks are turned off by Trump’s basic rudeness. He seems to just burst out with whatever is on his mind at the moment. Not the greatest formula for avoiding insults or lies.

“Politics has become theatre in the US. It’s a diversion from our daily cares. And everyone’s talking about Trump. ‘What did he do today? Did you hear what he said’?”

She paused for a moment. “But put all that aside. Think about what he has actually done. Consider his foreign policy, for instance. American Presidents have pretended for over 50 years that the US was committed to a just peace for Palestinians in any agreement with Israel. What nonsense! The US has been Israel’s most steadfast and often only ally since just after the Second World War when Israel was created. Trump doesn’t pretend. He openly supports Israel, and clearly couldn’t care less about the Palestinians.

“It may not have been the best move for Trump to appoint his Jewish son-in-law as his Mideast envoy, but Jared Kushner has appeared to help broker formal diplomatic ties with Bahrain and the UAE. More legitimacy could follow as Oman and others sign up with Israel.

“And you can’t deny that pushing back against China and its sneaky, technology-stealing ways was a good move. No other recent American President has stood up to Beijing like Trump has done. China and President Xi can’t push Trump around. I like that.

“And at home, his immigration policies actually fit where America is right now. You’ve got rising unemployment, lots of people behind on their home mortgages, and with the virus still ravaging the population, you just don’t want a bunch of new immigrants coming in to take US jobs, and maybe bringing the virus with them.”

The economic boom over which Trump presided for the first three years of his presidency is still fresh in the minds of many in the US, never mind the calamitous developments of this critical year. And many people are pointing to a very recent Gallup survey.

That poll found that 56 percent of Americans said they were better off now than they were four years ago, before Trump won the White House. That’s over ten percent better than Barack Obama, George W Bush or even Ronald Reagan polled at a comparable time before the election to decide if they would get a second term. All of them, of course, did get their second term.

Still, other polls report that only 42.2 percent of likely voters will choose Trump. But some of those same polls were anointing Hillary Clinton as America’s first female President at about this same time four years ago.

That’s what the Democrats keep hammering, night and day. Don’t be complacent! Let’s not repeat the mistakes the Clinton campaign made in 2016. Keep the faith! Stay the course! Keep pushing until the final bell rings!

At the same time some Republicans, especially in the Senate, are talking like they believe Joe Biden will prevail in the presidential race. Several, including Texas’ John Cornyn and Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, have virtually conceded the presidential contest already.

Are they just grandstanding to try to turn out the vote, and in Cornyn’s case, win re-election by seeming to part company with the President whose popularity is declining? Who knows? And, outside parts of their own states, who cares?

What we do know is that nearly 35 million people have already voted, and that it appears as many as two-thirds of them may have cast their ballots for Biden.

Trump spoke with the conservative American Enterprise Institute the other day. “Look, all I can do is create the greatest economy ever and we’ve done that,” he said. “I think Americans are going to want a great economy again as soon as we beat the virus. They know I can deliver. And I also think people are going to want law and order.”

Rioting and bloodshed in the streets of major American cities from Portland, Oregon to Washington, DC and from Atlanta to Minneapolis has underscored the need in many minds for tougher policies and more conservative judges.

Trump flubbed his first debate with Biden and now faces the last one tonight in Nashville. Some think it’s the President’s last chance to score real points in this campaign. Trump may feel it doesn’t matter how well some viewers feel he does as a debater. Many have reportedly already voted or made up their minds how they will vote, so the President might be correct.

What counts is whether or not the voters feel they are better off now than they were when he took office. If most voters feel their answer is ‘yes’, as the Gallup poll suggests, Trump may confound the pollsters and the odds and the conventional wisdom and win again.

Any of this sound familiar?

Cubans in Miami have long been a pretty conservative bunch. After all, they are descended from refugees who fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba and its socialist/Communist regime. South Florida Cuban-Americans have helped to keep the critical state of Florida moving gradually to the right and into a position where it has been decisive in national American elections. Remember Bush v Gore in 2000?

The current presidential election is playing out in Miami along deeply fractured ideological lines, just as it is almost everywhere else. In response to some particularly harsh anti-Biden rhetoric recently, a more liberally-inclined Cuban-American wag offered the following list of ten things on his Dictator’s Checklist.

The list conjured up memories of Fidel Castro and other authoritarian leaders, but the pundit told the Washington Post the present occupant of the White House also checks all these ten boxes:

1. Wants military parades

2. Holds huge self-glorifying rallies

3. Loves to see his name on buildings

4. Appoints family members to key government jobs

5. Muses about jailing the press and political foes

6. Dreams about being President for life

7. Keeps his finances a secret

8. Suppresses the vote

9. Enriches himself while in office

10. Encourages vigilantes and militias

Donald Trump as America’s Fidel Castro? Hmmm..

And you thought we had it bad

This has indeed been a sobering year, especially for public health and its effects on the human condition. A look back provides a bit of perspective, some of it downright scary. It does make you kind of wonder what we as a species have really learned in the past century.

One hundred years ago in 1920, the US was emerging from the devastation of an avian flu pandemic that killed 675,000 people in America and an estimated 50 million worldwide. As estimated 500 million people were infected. At the time, that was over five percent of the earth’s population.

The American Centers for Disease Control, still widely regarded as the gold standard of public health agencies despite President Trump’s occasional contrary views, says the following on its website:

“The properties of (the 1918 virus) that made it so devastating are still not well understood. With no vaccine to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that can be associated with influenza infections, control efforts worldwide were largely limited to isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants and limitations of public gatherings, which were applied unevenly.”

Of course, we now have much more sophisticated antibiotics. But does any of the rest sound familiar?

Now, the global population is approximately four times as large as it was a century ago. That projects to a potential loss of 200 million people if social habits worldwide don’t change pretty dramatically and medical science doesn’t soon develop, test, manufacture and distribute a safe vaccine.

It all sort of puts other daily news into perspective, doesn’t it?