BY ED FELIEN
Okay, so the Cheapside Carnival Freak show that is the Trump campaign, just got freakier.
First, some idiot kid takes his dad’s AR-15 and, at the last minute, picks up a couple boxes of shells and heads off to become famous.
He makes it to the roof of a shed near the stage carrying the rifle and the shells and a detonator to blow up his car as a distraction so he can make his getaway.
Someone sees him.
They shout to a cop, “Hey man, there’s a guy on the roof with a rifle.”
A cop goes to check it out, climbs up to look at him.
The kid points his AR at him.
The cop retreats.
The kid opens fire at the stage.
He has to hurry his shot. Trump turns. Does the bullet take off part of his ear, or does it hit something like the teleprompter and a flying glass shard cut him in the ear? Trump won’t release the medical reports, so we can’t really know what happened.
But Trump is quick to confirm it as a miracle.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight, but I am here by the grace of almighty God.”
“We live in a world of miracles.”
“I thank God.”
Eric Trump: “By the grace of God, divine intervention and the Guardian Angels above, you survived.”
The “miracle” confirms his divine calling:
“I alone can fix it.”
“I am your warrior. I am your justice. I am your retribution. So that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves.”
He proclaimed himself the anointed savior.
But then, another event pushed the Trump martyrdom off center stage.
In an act of selfless patriotism, Biden stopped his campaign and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris.
Kamela Harris’s father, Donald Harris, is a Jamaican from Irish and Jamaican parents. He taught the undergraduate course in the Theory of Capitalist Development at Stanford until his retirement in 1998.
Her mother was born in southern India. Shayamala Gopalan won a national competition for singing traditional Indian music as a teenager, and Shayamala Gopalan Harris made important contributions to breast cancer research at U C Berkeley and elsewhere with her scientific work on the progesterone receptor in mice. It changed research on the hormone responsiveness of breast tissue.
With her mixed and complex ethnic background, Kamala Harris makes the perfect adversary to a pronounced white racist.
With her history of support for women’s reproductive rights, she is right person to take on the man who boasts, “I killed Roe v Wade.”
With her history as Attorney General of California prosecuting sex offenders and fraudsters, she is the right person to take on a convicted sex offender and fraudster.
With her father’s simple Christian faith combined with her mother’s exuberant participation in Hindu rituals, she is the right person to expose Trump as the anti-Christ.
In Matthew 24: 4-24, Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many. . . . and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. . . . At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Messiah!’ or, ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.”
History will look back on this moment with wonder. How could so many be bamboozled by such an obvious huckster? But history will have to take into account the depth of racism and white male privilege that was so threatened by what seemed like inevitable progress.
They were an aggrieved class. They felt the earth move under their feet. There was a new world waiting for them, but they held onto the old and the delusions that reaffirmed their ancient prejudices.
