by Tisaranee Gunasekara

“The future is cloth waiting to be cut.”
Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes)

The point had been made often enough. Without a Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, there wouldn’t have been an Anura Kumara Dissanayake presidency. For the NPP/JVP to go from three percent to 42 percent in four plus years, the system had to be broken from within by the very leaders entrusted with its care by a majority of voters. Gotabaya Rajapaksa achieved that feat in ways inconceivable even by his most stringent critics (who in their sane minds could have imagined the fertilizer fiasco?).

But President Dissanayake’s victory has two other fathers: Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa. President Dissanayake won because the competition was so uninspiring. It was more a case of Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe losing rather than President Dissanayake winning. While the NPP’s rise was meteoric, President Dissanayake failed to gain 50 percent mark of the vote. He is Sri Lanka’s first minority president.

As the IHP polling revealed continuously, all major presidential candidates had negative net favourability ratings; they were more unpopular than popular. The election was a contest to pick the least unpopular leader. Thus the winner’s inability to clear the 50 percent line.

This situation hasn’t changed qualitatively in the run up to parliamentary election. According to the latest IHP poll, President Dissanayake’s net favourability rating is still negative, which means more people regard him unfavourably than favourably. He and Harini Amarasuriya are at minus 10, the least unpopular of leaders. Sajith Premadasa at minus 31, Ranil Wickremesinghe even lower, lag behind not just President Dissanayake and Ms. Amarasuriya, but also the now retired Ali Sabry.

The NPP/JVP is likely to clock a bigger win at the parliamentary election even so, because the oppositional space is clogged by Mr. Wickremesinghe and Mr. Premadasa, with the Rajapaksas hanging on to the seams. The same actors representing the same unattractive futures. Compared to these prospects, a Harini Amarasuriya premiership would seem alluring to most Sri Lankans (she is an excellent choice, in any case, for the job).

President Dissanayake has avoided any obvious missteps in his first month. He is treading cautiously, especially in the economic arena, opting not even to tweak Ranil Wickremesinghe’s deal with a group of ISB holders, despite some unfavourable – and precedent-making – clauses such as giving bondholders the option of changing the law underpinning them from New York to England or Delaware; New York is about to pass a bill giving debtor nations greater bargaining power. He is no Gotabaya, at least economics.

In Sri Lanka, it is normal for the party that wins the presidency to win the parliament as well. In 2010, after Mahinda Rajapaksa won the presidential election, the opposition unity fractured. The UNP contested on its own and the JVP contested in an alliance with the defeated presidential candidate, Sarath Fonseka. In the presidential election, Mr. Fonseka had polled 4.2 million. At the parliamentary election, the main oppositional party, the UNP, polled only 2.4 million. Even after the votes for the Tamil and Muslim parties and the JVP/Fonseka headed DNA were factored in, this amounted to an erosion on a massive scale – 1.2 million votes.

In 2019, Sajith Premadasa polled 5.6 million votes. Yet his newly formed SJB polled a mere 2.8 million at the 2020 parliamentary election. Once the votes given to Tamil and Muslim parties and the UNP were factored in, this amounted to a bigger erosion, over 2 million votes.

Even the Rajapaksas could not buck this general trend in 2015. The UNP won the general election despite the much vaunted Mahinda Sulanga.

So the NPP/JVP winning on November 14 would be the norm. The only question is about the extent of that victory: would it be limited to a simple majority or something bigger, close to a two thirds?

A simple majority would be necessary to run an effective government. But a near two thirds victory would be a tragedy. Every time a Sri Lankan party won so big, disaster ensued in 1956, 1970, 1977, 2010 and 2020. Too much power not just corrupts but also stupefies. A future NPP/JVP government might be able to avoid the (financial) corruption trap. But if burdened with a huge majority the government will not be able to evade a blunting of senses, of growing blindness and deafness to public distress, of an addling of wits. Already, future ministers are shrugging off price hikes in such staples as rice, calling them normal. They might be but the dismissive attitude hints that the rot of indifference to public pain might have begun to set in already. In the absence of a strong, principled, and effective opposition, the rot will grow faster, to the detriment of all Sri Lankans, including compass enthusiasts.

Feudal ethos and tyrannical practice

To be fully functional, a bourgeois democratic system needs bourgeois democratic parties. Unfortunately, most Sri Lankan parties are feudalist in ethos and tyrannical in practice. We have a history of leaders treating their parties as private or familial property. The Rajapaksas are the most egregious example but they didn’t start the habit, merely took it to a new low. Senanayakes and Bandaranaikes preceded the Rajapaksas, both families treating dynastic succession as the norm.

When he became the leader of the UNP, J.R. Jayewardene made a clean break with that feudalist ethos. He delinked the UNP from familial politics and opened it to new blood, providing the space for the creation of a line of brilliant second level leaders. In 1977, he allowed the candidates for the upcoming parliamentary election to choose a steering committee to manage the campaign (in a secret vote). The man who topped that internal poll was made the deputy leader, Ranasinghe Premadasa.

Had Mr. Jayewardene won a simple majority in 1977, history might have turned out differently and better. But he won a five sixth majority. It didn’t take long for hubris to set in, making a man of undeniable intellect commit a bunch of avoidable mistakes and unnecessary crimes. And having obtained undated letters of resignation from all parliamentarians, Mr. Jayewardene ran the party like a dictator. Unlike the Bandaranaikes and Senanayakes, he didn’t crown his offspring. Instead, he turned himself into an uncrowned king.

Ranil Wickremesinghe opted for a dictatorial leadership style from day one. He gave himself the title The Leader, changed the party constitution to make it literally impossible to effect leadership changes, marginalised potential challengers and promoted untalented loyalists. He slowly abandoned the J.R./Premadasa UNP’s anti-feudal ethos, turning the UNP into a party where preferment was given to spouses, siblings and offspring of politicians.

As president, Mr. Wickremesinghe prevented the economy’s freefall and achieved a turn around. The NPP government’s decision to go the same route, at least for now, is a tacit admission of the success President Wickremesinghe achieved under extremely difficult circumstances. Yet, his me-or-deluge attitude to the UNP continued and continues. As president, instead of allowing a new young leadership to rebuild the party, he kept control of the UNP via discredited and deeply unpopular yes men. After his humiliating defeat, he clings to the party leadership.

Sajith Premadasa in this department is a veritable Wickremesinghe clone. He has suffered three national defeats, losing the presidency twice and the parliament once. Yet, like Mr. Wickremesinghe, he seems determined to cling to the SJB leadership even at the cost of running the party to the ground. He is also allowing his family into politics. Consequently, the SJB too has become a party unsuited to a bourgeois democratic system, feudal in ethos, dictatorial in style.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake won the presidency because the JVP understood its own un-electability and created a more electable cocoon as cover, the NPP. Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe are incapable of even such minimal evolution. Like the woolly mammoths who couldn’t adapt to climate changes and were hunted extensively, their inability to adapt to the new political climate created by the NPP/JVP victory would drive their own parties to extinction. With no opposition to keep it on its toes, the government would succumb to hubris sooner rather than later.

The rest would be history. All too familiar history.

Somethings new, one thing old

What if J.R. Jayewardene did not commit the deadly mistake of banning the JVP on totally fabricated charges?

The JVP entered the democratic mainstream in 1977. From then till about 1983, the JVP was non-racist, trying to reach out to Tamils along the lines of class solidarity. It also treated the SLFP as its main enemy, and dreamted of becoming the main opposition (thus the famous lecture series: The Journey’s end for the SLFP). The JVP leadership maintained contact with some government leaders (especially Prime Minister Premadasa). When the opposition launched the general strike of July 1980, the JVP criticised the move and stayed out of it (the strike failed and the government sacked 60,000 striking workers). At a personal level, Mr. Wijeweera got married and started raising a family. These were hardly the actions of a party or a leader harbouring insurgent intentions.

Mr. Wijeweera’s abysmal performance in the 1982 election created a crisis in the JVP. The party’s reversion to a more Sinhala-oriented line was arguably a reaction to the shock of defeat. Yet going the armed revolution path was never on the JVP’s agenda even then. Had President Jayewardene not extended the life of the existing parliament (in which his UNP had a five sixth majority), the JVP would have contested the next general election (scheduled for 1983), won a few seats and settled down into standard parliamentary existence of reform and compromise.

Not only did President Jayewardene postpone parliamentary polls. He also banned the JVP. It was that criminal error which led to the second JVP insurgency (the insurgency’s racist, brutally intolerant nature was the JVP’s choice alone).

Perhaps President Dissanayake is where Mr. Wijeweera would have been had parliamentary election not been postponed and the JVP not been banned. Unfortunately, the JVP’s commendable evolution on matters economic has not been paralleled in the ethnic problem arena. The NPP was remarkably reticent on the subject in its tome-like presidential manifesto. Listening to the JVP general secretary Tilvin Silva indicates the reason. Behind a non-racist façade, the JVP is as regressive about the Tamil question today, as it was in the past.

“After 1970, our major political parties became provincialized gradually,” Mr. Silva said in a recent TV interview when asked about the NPP’s unimpressive electoral performance in the North and the East. “This allowed new forces to come into being in the North, the East, and the plantations… Tamil parties in the North, Muslim parties in the East, plantation parties in the plantations… So these parties decided on how to vote. For example, the people of the North did not vote freely. They voted according to what the TNA decided.”

Not a word about how the supposedly national parties alienated Tamils via discriminatory policies and violence actions, nothing about the disenfranchisement of Upcountry Tamils, Sinhala Only, the race riot of 1958, the standardization of university admissions in 1971 or the brutal attack on the Tamil Language Conference in Jaffna in 1974. Nothing of that history exists in the JVP’s universe, according to Mr. Silva. He admits to the existence of a language problem. The rest is reduced to water, markets, schools and education.

Perhaps the most telling is how he explains the land issue. “During the war some left their lands. Then they couldn’t return. Those who stayed back grabbed the land. Now when the owner goes back someone else is in occupation. So there’s a fight. So the government must intervene, set up land kachcheris and solve the problem.” Not a word about the continued military occupation 15 years after the war ended, the military’s ongoing attempts to grab more land or the road closures which hamper ordinary life. So like the Rajapaksas.

Mr. Silva accuses the Tamil leaders of talking about the 13th Amendment and devolution to protect their own interests. “But people on the ground don’t want 13; they don’t want devolution of power…” Even if that argument is granted, what about the thousands of acres occupied by the military? According to the JVP’s reading, do the Tamil people want their land back from the military, or not? Do they want their roads opened or not? Do they want justice for their dead or not? If the JVP cannot understand those basic demands and yearnings, if the best solution it can offer is administrative decentralisation (under a de facto military occupation), the NPP won’t make much headway in creating a Sri Lankan nation. If Sri Lanka’s road ahead lies between a Sinhala government and a feudalist autocratic (and ineffective opposition), the next five years are unlikely to be all that different from the last 76.

(First published in Groundviews)

By Uditha Devapriya

It has been a month since Anura Kumara Dissanayake assumed the presidency, a month since the NPP claimed its place in history as the first party from outside of the political establishment to win a presidential election in Sri Lanka. Two weeks from now, the NPP will face another election, this time parliamentary. Depending on the results it gets, we will know whether the people approve of the NPP’s actions over the last four weeks and if they want it to continue. The NPP’s call for a powerful government is, in itself, not alarming: no government can survive without a majority in parliament. Yet it will need to convince Sri Lankans that it is the party they need – the party not of power, but of change.

Paradoxically, that it hails from a non-elite background may prove to be more a challenge than a strength – and I am not talking about the parliamentary election only. In 2022, the NPP sealed its reputation as a credible voice of the aragalaya. It received the backing of sections of civil society, the youth, and other electorates, including the Sinhala peasantry and middle-class, which had voted for the SLFP or, more specifically, the Rajapaksas. It was no easy feat weaning them away from their traditional strongholds – the JVP receiving less than 50 percent of the vote shows that they did not totally succeed at this.

Yet now that it has absorbed these electorates, it must speak to them and act in line with their aspirations. In itself, this should not be too difficult a task. The NPP’s mandate, in its simplest formulation, is to relieve the suffering of the many. How it does this is left to be seen, but over the coming months, it will have to signal to people that it is capable of seeing that task through. However, it must contend with the fact that these electorates, so to speak, do not exactly align with each other. What NGOs demands, for instance, is not what farmers in Anuradhapura or Hambantota have in mind, or prioritise.

This partly explains the government’s confused response to the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). In the run up to the election, the NPP clearly stated that the PTA had to go. It did not explain how it would do this when in power, but it indicated that it would abolish the Act. Civil society favours abolition; nationalists, including those who prioritise security, from the military, probably do not. While promises and pledges need to be kept, regardless of the consequences of certain decisions, the NPP now has several groups to satisfy. Obviously, it feels it needs to make concessions, or adjustments, to some of its policies.

The NPP’s, and the JVP’s, shift to the centre was evident even before the election. Going by some of its recent appointments, including of corporate bigwigs, it is targeting the middle ground in almost everything it does. As Ramindu Perera points out in a recent analysis, the JVP shifted course after two attempts (2010 and 2015) of supporting common opposition candidates. In 2019, it framed itself as the alternative party – to the UNP and the SLFP-SLPP. However, without the Sinhalese middle-class vote, it could not win the race. It thus had to shift course somewhat in the next few years.

It is significant that Dilith Jayaweera’s comments on the suitability of certain candidates in the NPP and his questioning of their national(ist) credentials has led, not to a blowback from the NPP, but rather a shift within the NPP over the issues he addresses. The pro-Rajapaksa nationalist crowd were fond of demeaning the JVP as unpatriotic, of depicting them a group of radicals hell-bent on erasing Sri Lanka’s Buddhist heritage. Nothing that JVP MPs have said or done over the last three, four years warranted such criticisms – and to its credit, the JVP itself struck back at them. However, upon coming to power, the NPP has disappointed those who thought it would undermine Sri Lanka’s culture and way of life.

On closer inspection, of course, none of this should come as a surprise. In 2005, the JVP backed Mahinda Rajapaksa’s candidacy based on their position on the war: like Rajapaksa, they supported a military solution. When Rajapaksa, being the shrewd politician that he is, weaned away the JVP’s electorate from the JVP, the latter positioned itself in opposition to him and his family. Towards 2010, they began rebranding themselves as the party of anti-corruption, even while fundamentally supporting the government’s campaign against the LTTE. By 2015, with an upsurge in anti-Rajapaksa sentiment among even SLFP supporters and the youth, they squared the circle by both campaigning against the Rajapaksas and not explicitly endorsing the common candidate, Maithripala Sirisena.

The latter decision benefited the NPP immensely when Sirisena, with the UNP under Ranil Wickremesinghe, undermined the yahapalana government’s mandate. However, given the upsurge in security concerns after the 2019 Easter attacks, and the Joint Opposition’s deft mobilisation of nationalist sentiment against the yahapalana regime’s supine liberalism – represented not by Ranil Wickremesinghe, but rather Mangala Samaraweera – it could not seize the moment. A few NPP supporters at the time told me that they decided to support Gotabaya Rajapaksa instead of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, for tactical reasons – not because they did not trust Dissanayake, but because they felt he could not win.

This brings up another point. Liberal civil society always had an uneasy relationship with the JVP. They had an uneasy relationship with Ranil Wickremesinghe as well, but although Wickremesinghe’s liberal credentials were suspect even during the ceasefire, they preferred to overlook his limitations and promote his peacemaker image. They were much less lenient with the JVP. English newspapers from that period, especially those aligned with the UNP, are chock-a-block with editorials and columns censuring the JVP’s stance on the war and its militant past. Indeed, the JVP was blackguarded every week, almost every day, particularly after it received ministries from Chandrika Kumaratunga.

The situation has clearly changed today. Civil society, even if one includes only NGOs and the development sector in Colombo, is not what it was back then. The older, genteel liberal intelligentsia has given way to a more vocal, articulate, bilingual activist class. They may be funded – as much of civil society is, and as the aragalaya itself was – but they are more attuned to the NPP’s radical-centrist vision than the fossils of the UNP. Yet on certain issues, they remain as steadfast as their predecessors were. And one of those issues, which the NPP has effectively blotted its copybook with, is the PTA – which young and old activists, from Colombo and elsewhere, continue to deride. For the youngest generation out there on the streets, the PTA brings back memories of arrests during the aragalaya. For older generations, including my parents’, it brings back memories of the war.

The Prevention of Terrorism Act, thus, is not something that can be magically swept aside or forgotten. One can argue that it is unfair to expect the NPP to do overnight what successive regimes have failed to achieve for the last 76 years. Yet promises on issues that unify several electorates, and several generations, cannot be backtracked – and if they are, the NPP runs the risk of losing face, as it somewhat has. Social media is of course by no means an accurate gauge of public opinion, but judging from NPP supporters who have taken to Twitter to berate the party over its communique on the PTA, it is clear that the government needs to clarify its stance immediately – or else.

The NPP, like other parties, is evolving. It has never been the governing party, but that does not mean it has no experience in governing. Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Vijitha Herath were both Cabinet Ministers under Chandrika Kumaratunga. In choosing Harini Amarasuriya as Prime Minister, they have broken several glass ceilings. I believe that if the government is to keep up this momentum, it needs to stick to its manifesto. Of course, on certain issues – notably the IMF agreement – it has room to moderate itself, as it already has. Yet on more crucial topics, such as the PTA, which after all has been used against the JVP, it will have to stick to what it said and what it pledged.

For more than 30 years, Ranil Wickremesinghe played the part of the ultimate provocateur in national politics. Today, the NPP is in power. The NPP does not have the cynicism that Wickremesinghe and the Royalist Regency do. Yet that cynicism is not the preserve of that Regency. It can be appropriated by any group, and it can be misused – as Wickremesinghe did in 2024, and John Kotelawala did in 1956. The Royalist Regency is part of the “Deep State” in Sri Lanka. If the NPP is serious about breaking it, it needs to reread its manifesto and take stock of the people who supported it – and brought it to power.

Uditha Devapriya is a regular commentator on history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com .

Democracy under threat, as Trump sows doubt on election integrity

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

President Ronald Reagan, “The Great Communicator” was famous for conceptualizing the American Dream, in a loose paraphrasing of the words enshrined in the Statue of Liberty.

Concluding his farewell speech in 1988, Reagan said, “I’ve spoken of the Shining City all my political life….But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks, stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.

“And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure and happier….And she is still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home”.

Next Tuesday’s election, and its aftermath, will be held in unique circumstances. The vote, bar a miracle, will no longer matter. The nation’s democracy appears to have already succumbed, its journey towards the Shining City on the Hill all but abandoned.

Trump, backed by his white supremacist, MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement has been chipping away at the nation’s democracy from the day an African American was elected to the highest position in the land, in 2008. A feeling of racist resentment which became progressively more malevolent as President Barack Obama rescued the country from the recession caused by the reckless expenditure and human lives lost in an illegal war, waged by the previous Republican administration of George W. Bush.

And rescued it with the most ethical, graceful, competent presidential terms in history, which ended with a booming economy of 75 consecutive months of economic development, with the highest job growth and the lowest unemployment rate in decades. Without a trace of personal and political scandal. A performance of excellence that served to stoke with even more intensity the resentment of the racist white population.

None more than narcissistic and racist New York billionaire, Donald Trump, who was envious to the point of psychosis of the admiration that President Obama was universally held.

When Donald Trump took center stage of the Republican Party in 2016, Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate of 2012, warned Americans to face the reality of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign: “His domestic policies would lead to recession; his foreign policies would make America and the world less safe; he has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president; and his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill”.

America ignored the wisdom behind these prophetic words and elected Trump to the presidency in 2016. Fortunately, Americans came to their senses during Trump’s first term. Recognizing his narcissistic incompetence, his criminal mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, which resulted in the avoidable deaths of 650,000 Americans, and the authoritarian path Trump was treading, Americans unceremoniously fired him, by a landslide, in 2020.

Incredibly, white Republicans, suffering from a serious case of selective amnesia, have gone back to the leadership of a man who was a convicted fraud and rapist, even in 2016. A man under whose presidency the United States endured a near-recession and the contempt of the free world. A convicted felon who was impeached twice during his presidency, and convicted, arrested and on trial on 91 counts of felonies, including sedition, obstruction of justice and espionage, after his defeat in 2020.

A man who has successfully aroused and taken advantage of white America’s basest instincts, whose violent, racist policies beg Ronald Reagan’s question:

How stands the city today?

According to Trump, the beautiful shining city “has become the dumping ground, a garbage can for the rest of the world…. Immigrants invade the Southern border; they are murderers, they are rapists, they bring drugs; they come from the prisons and insane asylums of shithole countries from all over the world”.

According to Trump’s agenda, if re-elected, he plans the construction of detention (concentration) camps and mass deportation programs for up to 20 million illegal and some categories of legal immigrants. He agrees with Hitler’s concept of the mixing of races, when Hitler wrote in his manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning”.

In fact, all great cultures of the past perished only by the genocidal massacres of the marauding Europeans, led by the masters of the game, the Anglo-Saxons.

Trump’s dark language about immigrants being vermin who “poison the blood of people” is based on a scientifically spurious theory of eugenics, the deeply dishonest “scientism” that criminality, violence, poverty and idiocy are the direct results of genetics. Nazis used eugenics to justify the extermination of entire races in Europe in the mid-20th century.

Trump, in his ignorance, recently applied this theory of eugenics to his presidential rival, Vice-President Harris, when he stated at a recent speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, that “Lyin’ Kamala Harris is mentally impaired; honestly, I believe she was born that way….And I just don’t know what it is, but there’s definitely something missing”.

Sure there is. Both Kamala’s parents received their PhDs from the University of California, Berkeley. Kamala’s father, Donald Harris, a Jamaican, now 86 years of age, was the first black Professor Emeritus of Economics to receive tenure at Stanford University, CA. Her mother, a South Indian from Chennai, was a biomedical scientist engaged in research into breast cancer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at Berkeley, CA. She was 70-years-old when she died of colon cancer in 2009.

Vice-President Harris overcame these terrible genes and graduated with a law degree from the Hastings College of Law in California. Starting her career as a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s office in Alameda County, CA., she is now the Vice-President of the United States of America.

Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday, the Republican Party’s “closing argument”, was described by the New York Times as “a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism”. On the other hand, Donald Trump described it as a night filled with love. Trump’s brand of love that’s usually followed by rape and insurrection.

As he said at a recent campaign speech in Wisconsin, “whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them”. Like he has “protected” numerous women against their will, for which “protection” he has been convicted for sexual assault in the past!

The roster of speakers at the Madison Square Garden rally was brimming with the most racist and vulgar of speakers. A comedian described Puerto Rico, an American territory, as “a floating island of garbage”. He went on to insult Latinos, blacks, Jews and Palestinians, American citizens, who constitute significant minorities in many swing states.

Pennsylvania, a must-win state, currently deadlocked, has a Puerto Rican population of 470,000 (5%) out a total electorate of 6.8 million, which Biden won by a mere 70,000 (1%) votes in 2020.

These Americans minorities, especially the Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, will hopefully show their anger at the denigration of their homelands at the ballots on Election Day.

Kamala Harris was variously and viciously described at the rally as a prostitute, the Antichrist and the Devil. Trump also talked about getting the military, after he wins re-election, to arrest, court martial and possibly execute his political and military “enemies from within”. Disgusting rhetoric wildly applauded by Trump supporters.

A campaign rally never to be surpassed in hard-core bigotry and sheer vulgarity and lies, blithely dismissed by Republican candidate for the Vice-Presidency, JD Vance as “some people can’t take a little joke”!

Trump endeared himself even more to women at a rally in Pennsylvania, when he said, “women will be happy, healthy, confident and free when I am your president. You will no longer be thinking of abortion”. A strange statement from the man who killed Roe v. Wade which denies women’s reproductive freedom. An issue that may cost him the election.

The Russia-based disinformation campaign against Harris and Walz has already started. The quaintly named “R – FBI (Russian Federation for Battling Injustice) has already spread a rumor on social media that Harris shot an endangered rhino while on Safari in Zambia and Walz sexually assaulted a student in Minnesota. I suppose we should be thankful that Kamala didn’t sexually assault the rhino, and Walz didn’t shoot the student!

So how will the Shining City stand after November 5?

My guess is as good as yours.

Whatever the result – win, lose or draw – next Tuesday, the pestilence of Trumpism, the MAGA movement, backed by the Billionaires’ Club, is here to stay. The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is now actively campaigning for and financing Felon Trump. The decision to refuse to endorse Harris by the owners of the liberal Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, billionaires Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, is regarded as an indication that billionaires are jumping on the Trump bandwagon.

Perhaps America has finally outlived the dream of the Shining City on a Hill. Trump has managed to polarize the nation through hatred and fear of immigrants, taking advantage of the racism that has plagued the white, Christian population through the ages.

Trump and the Republicans have sowed so much distrust in the integrity of the electoral process that every aspect of the process, especially in the vital battleground states, is subject to intense scrutiny and suspicion.

No democracy can function without complete confidence in the integrity of its elections and the peaceful transfer of power, which Trump and his white supremacist mob undermined in 2021, and will violently challenge, if he is defeated next Tuesday.

If Trump wins, even by the smallest of margins, the Republican Party agenda as outlined in Project 2025 will go into immediate effect. Trump will be the de facto dictator, acting on the instructions of his billionaire backers. Political opponents will be jailed, the media silenced and the constitution terminated, to be replaced by an updated constitution, modeled on Project 2025.

If Vice-President Harris wins, by whatever margin (remember Trump has still to concede the 2020 election, which Biden won by a landslide), Trump will dispute every inevitably close result in Tuesday’s election, especially results in the swing states, without a shred of evidence. He has already started the process, accusing Pennsylvania of cheating, and claiming at a rally in New Mexico “Your votes are rigged”. With a totally partisan and corrupt Supreme Court, the nation will be embroiled in a constitutional crisis for an indeterminate period, accompanied by sporadic violence.

The Shining City is now political rubble in the depths of the ocean. Democracy in the most beautiful, the most blessed nation in the world has been stolen by a narcissistic, power-hungry psychopath, backed by an oligarchy of billionaires, with authoritarianism and kleptocracy snapping at its heels.

Kamala Harris gave a powerful closing argument last Tuesday before a crowd of over 75,000 at the Ellipse, the symbolic venue that Trump made his infamous rant, inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol, to hang Vice-President Pence and to violently curtail the peaceful transfer of power, on January 6, 2021.

The core of Harris’ speech was that she intends to be the president for all Americans, even those who disagree with her. She’ll give them a seat at the table, unlike Trump, who plans to put his political opponents in jail.

If anyone can perform the miracle of reversing the process and restoring the nation’s progress towards rebuilding the Shining City, that would be Vice-President Kamala Harris. She has already performed one miracle. She has brought ultra-right conservative Liz Cheney and extreme left Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio Cortez under the same Democratic tent.

Kamala Harris and the women of America can bury Trump. In a landslide.