AAs Vice President Kamala Harris plummets in the polls, arguments over the merger of the Democratic National Committee, the Harris campaign and the mainstream media become even more absurd.

Claiming that JD Vance and Donald Trump were “weird” didn’t work — especially given the truly odd behavior of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and future first gentleman Doug Emhoff.

Harris’ subsequent meme also failed to convince that the frantic, incessant Trump was somehow “exhausted,” “senile,” and “confused.” Voters know that the younger Harris’s workdays are typically much shorter — or sometimes not at all.

But Harris also falsely claimed that the physically and mentally disabled Biden was, in her words, “absolutely authoritarian” and “very bold and dynamic.”

Today, Harris claims that Trump is a “fascist,” a “dictator,” and “unfit” for office. But this new talking point won’t stop the Harris campaign’s hemorrhaging either – and for a variety of reasons.

First, voters see the election as a conflict between two absolutely antithetical visions.

On the one hand, there is Trump’s concrete record between 2017 and 2020: border security, no major wars abroad, calm in the Middle East, Russia, Iran and China deterred, low inflation, low interest, lower crime, lower taxes, a strong military deterrent – ​​and opposition to mandatory mandates for electric vehicles, biological males competing in women’s sports, and the woke/DEI agenda.

On the other, the Biden-Harris 2021-2024 record: the uncontrolled entry of 12 to 20 million illegal aliens and a destroyed border. People are still struggling with Biden-Harris hyperinflation and high interest rates. Horrible regional wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue. Biden-Harris embraces the unpopular DEI/woke agenda.

Harris herself knows that the Biden-Harris years were a failure. That’s why she abandoned almost all of her hard-left programs — policies she espoused for much of her adult life. Suddenly, in the last 90 or so days, Harris completely flipped.

She now favors more funding for the police, not defunding them. She advocates for a secure border, not for 20 million illegal aliens crossing it. Harris brags about fossil fuel energy, not banning fracking, and increasing, not decreasing, defense.

In fact, several endangered Democratic incumbent senators in swing states claim allegiance to Trump’s issues more than they identify with Harris and her unpopular record as vice president.

Voters will likely conclude that if Trump doubles his record, while even Harris and many senators are temporarily using it, then it must be more effective and popular than Harris’s.

Second, Harris now claims that Trump is a fascist and an insurrectionist.

But saying “January 6” ad nauseum no longer persuades voters that Trump is a danger to anyone. They recall that Harris bragged about the far more violent protests of 2020 – 35 killed, $2 billion in damage, 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, 14,000 arrested – that the unrest was not going away and “does not should not stop, while mobilizing support to bail out the country. violent protesters imprisoned.

The insult that Trump is a fascist doesn’t resonate either. The Obama and Biden-Harris administrations used the CIA and FBI as weapons to interfere in the 2016 and 2020 elections by peddling the false Steele dossier and suppressing all embarrassing news about Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop.

Trump certainly did not coordinate, as Biden did, with local, state and federal prosecutors to pursue legal action to destroy his political opponents. He did not use the FBI to partner with social media to suppress information.

Neither Trump nor his supporters have attempted to remove Biden from the national polls.

The House Republican majority failed to impeach Biden twice, despite Biden family corruption and Joe Biden’s decades-long illegal removal of classified documents from multiple unsecured private residences.

Trump and the Republicans have never coercively removed the winning party’s primary nominee. They did not overturn the will of 14 million primary voters. And behind the scenes, they did not nominate a candidate who had never participated in a single primary in her life.

Trump also did not support the Supreme Court nomination. He is not looking for unconstitutional ways to destroy the Electoral College. It does not require an end to the Senate filibuster or the creation of two new states to gain four partisan Senate seats.

Third, as to whether Trump is “unfit” and lacks “decorum,” that depends on Biden-Harris standards.

Asking a trans activist to reveal her breasts on camera at a White House “pride party”?

Biden reportedly called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “idiot (expletive)” and a “son of a bitch?” Bragging about locking up Trump while waging a legal war against him?

Let go of his son Hunter Biden with impunity to bring down foreign governments?

The election will not be decided on these empty arguments or false narratives generated by the media.

Instead, only two criteria matter: What is the candidate’s past and current agenda that most appeals to voters? And which candidate seems the most genuine and authentic?

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Contact him at [email protected].