The candidates for president of the United States and their surrogates are talking a lot about values, and demonstrating their very different interpretations of what exactly that word means.
It was a setting that recalled a horror many Americans have tried to forget, the place where former president Donald Trump incited a crowd that morphed into a mob to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In her closing argument in Washington on Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris, flanked by the Stars and Stripes, instead ended her speech talking about the values instilled in her by “family by blood and family by love,” the values of “community, compassion and faith.”
The Democratic nominee repeated her belief that “the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us.”
Looking at the gulf that is the partisan divide in America, that may indeed take a leap of faith. However, it is a lot sunnier than the vision Trump, the Republican nominee, conjured up at his weekend Madison Square Garden rally in New York City.
When Trump said early in his first campaign for the presidency that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” it turns out he was right. It was appropriate those remarks were made at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, a Christian college, since Trump’s most loyal constituency has been white evangelicals, who’ve stuck with him since then, no matter what.
“Compassionate conservatism” is so George W. Bush, a former president effectively banished from Trump’s GOP and replaced with a new brand of retribution and revenge.
It’s just proof that having religion does not necessarily equate to caring about your fellow man.
The nightmarish lineup at Trump’s New York rally offered insults toward Puerto Ricans, Jews, Musli
