Is the Game of Pretend Over for Harris and the Democrats?

​Photo Credit | Gage Skidmore

The Harris-Walz Campaign has had a terrible, no good, very bad few weeks. It’s not merely a matter of advertising aesthetics, campaign resource allocation, or even rotten luck. It’s about the fundamental dishonesty that has been displayed by Democrats, their media allies, and even our government.  

It started on October 2 when J. D. Vance reduced Tim Walz to a frightened doe looking into the headlights of a semi all while seeming extraordinarily smart and gentlemanly. Vance then managed the same feat with a host of Sunday morning talk show hosts, famously asking Martha Raddatz if she were actually listening to herself when she demurred that “only a handful” of apartment complexes had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs. 

Then this week Fox’s Bret Baier dared to press Kamala Harris, in her only real interview thus far, as he would any politician. The interview was shortened both because she showed up late and because her pathetic performance led to the Harris handlers waving frantically in the background to end the conversation. And, finally, to the consternation of anyone with a mind in the Democratic Party, Ms. Harris decided not to attend the traditional Al Smith Memorial Dinner, the first candidate to decline since 49-state loser Walter Mondale in 1984. Belatedlysensing this was a mistake, her team created a video message in which Harris did a sketch with Saturday Night Live alumna Molly Shannon that drew few laughs and tepid applause from the Smith Dinner crowd, many of whom were among her donors and supporters—and who nevertheless laughed at Donald Trump’s hilarious and occasionally bawdy takedowns of Democrats and their presidential ticket.

Though Republicans have traditionally not been able to do “cool” over the last few decades, Democrats aren’t crushing it in this department either. The Harris sketch was done with Shannon in the persona of her still unfunny SNL character of Catholic schoolgirl Mary Catherine Gallagher, a character whodebuted in 1995.

But being seen by the American public as uncool or, as the kids say, “cringe,” isn’t the only reason for the troubles of Harris-Walz. In fact, the fundamental problem for this campaign is deeper. No matter how many times Democrats and media says that Donald Trump has told nine million trillion lies since 2015, the reality is that most Americans can tell the difference between Trump’s hyperbole, jokes, simple mistakes of facts, and starting bids in his never-ending quest for perfection in the art of the deal—and the real lies that have been peddled by the media, the Democrats, and our government over the last few years.

It might be easy to focus on the campaign dishonesty. There has been so much of it. Hilariously, Harris supporters tried to tell Americans that Kamala’s horrifying twenty minutes of Bret Baier questioning was a stunning triumph. And the Washington Post, while not quite able to say it directly, published a piece trying to insinuate it titled, “Did Kamala Harris eke out a victory on Fox News?” Amusingly, as in most cases of Kamala Harris’s speaking engagements, there were few highlight clips being passed around by her own side—much less the entire interview. It fell to the Trump Campaign to post theentire interview on social media, with the tagline “OUR NEWEST AD JUST DROPPED.”  

So, too, in the days after that debacle, some have attempted to portray the Smith Dinner video as a triumph. But a better sign of what really took place was captured in the New York Post’s story about the “head-scratching Al Smith Dinner skit that left audience puzzled, silent.” The Post,  without noting emcee JimGaffigan’s years-long case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, did record his response to the audience’s silent puzzlement: “‘I don’t even know what that noise is,’ he said before imitating the audience reaction: ‘Meeeeeeeh.’” He then quipped that he had gained knowledge of how his children felt when he “FaceTimedinto a piano recital.”

Indeed, the Harris-Walz Campaign has now been trying for at least a week to convince Americans that Donald Trump is too elderly and incapacitated to be president. When Trump decided to stop taking questions and play music on Monday in Oaks, Pennsylvania, because two people in attendance had medical issues that were being taken care of, Democrats tried to portray this as a bizarre senior moment. This was so patently false that ABC News blew the whistle on it.

On Friday, KamalaHQ posted on X about Trump’s appearance on the Dan Bongino Show: “Trump abruptly ends his live interview after it is reported that he is canceling interviews because he is ‘exhausted’: ‘Off the record, I gotta get going.’” This was particularly ridiculous because Trump had stayed on the show for about a half hour longer than planned. Remember that the Harris team waved a white flag after only twenty minutes. Not only that, but on Tuesday, Trump had faced a hostile interviewer in Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait for nearly an hour. 

No, the Harris Campaign now is simply writing free-form fantasy about what’s happening with their candidates and their opponents. And Americans are seeing this. But what they are seeing even more clearly is that what the government under Democratic control has been telling them is fundamentally false. Just as it was revealed last month that the government’s claims about how many jobs had been created under the Biden-Harris Administration had been exaggerated by over 818,000, so this week Americans learned that the FBI’s crime numbers had been quietly “revised.” As John Lott at RealClearInvestigationsreported, the long-running claim that crime in America had dropped in 2022 by 2.1% was revealed to have been based on bad information. Violent crime rose by 4.5%. “The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021. There were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults.”

I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll pass on the 2023 FBI claims of another 3.5% drop until we know more.

Oh, by the way, we probably do know more. Lott observes that the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which annually interviews 240 thousand people about their experiences of criminal behavior, shows a 29.1% increase in violent crime for 2022 and another 4.5% increase for 2023. The “fact check” of Trump’s claims of increased crime at the presidential debate was itself in need of a fact check. 

In addition to the rotten jobs data, we are also seeing more and more evidence that everyday Americans’ persistent claims that the economy is not working for them are more accurate than the official claims that we are living our best economic life ever. Heritage Foundation economist E. J. Antoni has been posting Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that “cumulative inflation since Q4 ’20 exceeds 20%, eclipsing earnings growth so that your larger paycheck buys you less; you’re demonstrably worse off—almost 4 years and no progress.” In an article with Peter St. Onge, Antoni looks past official data and concludes that real cumulative inflation has been much greater than official data suggest. Though “Trump-era deregulation led to marginal decreases in the cost of living which were not captured by official inflation metrics in 2019 and 2020,” this trend “had fully reversed by the fourth quarter of 2022 under Biden-Harris.” Their view is that the American economy has been in a recession since 2022.  

And, in case you were in any doubt about the Biden-Harris commitment to allowing young people to have their biochemistry and genitals mutilated in the name of radical gender ideology, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall published the amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief the State of Alabama had submitted for a case challenging Tennessee’s limits on so-called gender affirming surgeries, showing “a medical, legal, and political scandal that will be studied for decades to come.” The scandal is this. When it came to challenges to Alabama’s prohibition on such treatments for minors, “The federal government, ‘social justice lawyers’ from prominent activist organizations, and self-appointed experts at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) conspired to abolish age limits for sterilizing chemical treatments and surgeries.” 

That’s right. The Biden-Harris Administration doesn’t want any age limits for either chemical or surgical mutilations of children. And though the Department of Health and Human Services knew that “there is little/no evidence about children and adolescents” with regard to long term effects, it had testified to the Supreme Court that this was an evidence-based position. And the Department of Justice tried to prevent discovery in Alabama’s case. 

Every American, no matter their views on so-called gender transition in general, should be deeply worried about a government that is both dishonest about the health effects of treatments on children and tries to prevent Americans from knowing them.   

In some very famous lines, often attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer Elena Gorkova described in her 2010 memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs, the “game of vranyo,”that is, the game of pretending that was necessary in Soviet society: “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.” Eventually, the lies became too great to bear. The people could no longer pretend to believe.  

This is what is happening to the Harris-Walz Campaign. Too many people have been waking up to the reality that they have been swallowing lies. Too many who knew and were pretending to believe them have grown tired of pretending. 

No, the economy is not great. No, crime is not better. No, a “handful” of apartment complexes ruled by illegal immigrant gangs is not acceptable. No, the claim that medically sterilizing and altering the bodies of young men and women who are confused about their identities is not scientific or safe or good. No, the Trump years were not bad. No, Trump is not senile or weak. No, a vote for a candidate who never received a single primary vote is not a vote for democracy. And no, that candidate, Kamala Harris, evinces neither joy nor the ability to take on any kind of serious job, much less leader of the free world. 

The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time the Harris Campaign has suffered has little chance of getting better. For it is built on a series of lies that are steadily coming to light. And Americans can neither believe nor pretend to believe them any longer.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.