The Most Insane Month Of My Life
For those of you living in the United States who have not yet voted, please do so. And vote for Kamala Harris, because, for all the times you’ve probably been told that this is the most important election in United States history, that is in fact the case now. I’m not going to hammer home why Gaza is a dumb reason to sit this out, simply because I already did that a few days ago. But here we are. Vote. Please.
I want to believe all dogs go to heaven, especially given how good of a dog you were. Rest in peace, Padfoot!
I remember the date - June 27, 2024. My mother and I sat with our ailing dog, a Bouvier des Flanders named Padfoot. His name was a relic of the days when Harry Potter references were not frowned upon, though that’s beside the point. In any case, we sat in what’s referred to as the “cigar room” and tuned in to the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. As soon as I saw Joe Biden limp on stage with a shuffling gait, I knew it was going to be a long night, and I almost regretted the fact that I don’t drink for medical reasons. And, well…
A “We Finally Beat Medicare” T-shirt, a humorous reference to one of the most painful moments of the 2024 campaign.
Trump told horrendous lie after horrendous lie during the debate, which is to be expected, even if not accepted. But the worst part was that Biden let him. The guy didn’t seem up to it, and it was just painful to watch. Within minutes Biden’s staff claimed he had a cold, but let’s be honest with ourselves: Nobody actually believed that. An existential dread filled me as I realized that Trump was going to win the election unless something drastic happened. I remember having a hard time sleeping that night, and when I phone-banked the next day for Biden, several would-be Democratic voters were undecided due to the 46th President’s horrendous performance. I held out hope that maybe the debate wouldn’t matter that much - in fact, the campaign’s best fundraising hour was actually between 11 PM and 12 AM on the night of that debate. Maybe things were backwards.
But this was not like the Hur Report in February. The Hur Report was easy enough to dismiss, because it read like a partisan hit job, and Robert Hur is in fact a Republican. But none of us could deny what we’d seen with our own eyes. Within a few days, the first calls came for Biden to step down as nominee, and the President seemed to be digging his heels in. With every day that Biden insisted he wasn’t going to drop out, my dread grew further. The next day I remember well is July 13.
One of the most famous photographs of 2024. You all know where it’s from.
My older brother and I were getting ready to go to dinner at a seafood/Mexican fusion restaurant, and I was looking at my phone when I saw the news alert. When my brother came down the stairs in his dinner clothes, I was like, “Trump got shot”. Both of us were stunned at living through such a historic event, the most serious assassination attempt on a U.S. president since 1981. We went to dinner, and the restaurant very wisely had sports on the TV instead of a news channel, while my brother kept telling me not to look at my phone too much. And I was fairly successful at that, but it was HARD!
The general sentiment in my Discord communities was that the assassination attempt had just sealed the election for Trump. It didn’t matter that the deceased gunman was a registered Republican who had a Trump sign on his lawn - those infamous raised-fist photographs were all over social media. Perhaps the most striking fact about that event is not that a former and potentially future President (again, please vote for Harris) was just a handful of centimeters from death. Rather, it’s that the political world is hardly talking about it anymore. If the gunman’s hand had twitched, the assassination attempt would have been successful, and yet it’s been memory-holed by all but his most ardent cultists who went to a future rally at the same spot like he’s Jesus. But unlike Jesus, he’ll doom us rather than save us if he’s elected, so again: Vote for Harris if you haven’t already.
President Joe Biden boarding Air Force One, taken from a July 2024 Reuters article.
Then, during the RNC, Biden tested positive for COVID. At first, I thought this wasn’t going to affect things too much. He might be 81 years old, but “the President has COVID” just isn’t as big a news story in 2024 as it was in 2020. I had my own bout with COVID starting a few days later, enduring numerous coughing fits; my mother claimed that was the sickest she’d seen me since I had meningitis as a newborn. While isolating myself from the rest of my family in my pajamas on the porch (being sick during the summer isn’t fun), I was texting on Discord when I got the ping stating that Biden had withdrawn from the race. I predicted a quick consolidation around his Vice President, and I was proven right when Biden endorsed Kamala Harris to run in his place.
And thus, the most chaotic month in U.S. politics that I can remember came to a close. In my greatest fantasies, history students in the year 2124 will read my blog as a firsthand account of those 23 wild days. It’s a remote fantasy, to be sure, but can’t a man dream? No matter what, the tell-all books in the next few years are going to be quite something.
That brings us to today. If Harris wins, what will haunt me for a long time is that if Donald Trump had not agreed to an unusually early debate, the debate would have happened in September instead, when it would have been too late for Joe Biden to be replaced on the ballot. While I still think it’s at least conceivable that enough Democrats would have come home to make the race somewhat close, I still believe Trump would have almost certainly defeated Biden in that hypothetical rematch. He might still win, which is the horrifying part, and I don’t think I need to tell you why.
Vote for Harris if you have not done so already. Let’s stop Project 2025 and put this bizarre, horrific era behind us.
