As the 2024 presidential campaign was unfolding, few people questioned the determination, fortitude, and energy Donald Trump would bring back to the Oval Office if he won a second term. No one on either side had much doubt he would follow through lickety-split on a range of audacious promises and attempt to upend the way Washington operates. And two months into his 48-month term, he has performed just as friend and foe alike had expected.
But what if Trump had lost the election? What if Kamala Harris had won and enacted her agenda? It is fair to say, as most on both sides did during the campaign, that the difference between the two candidates, the gulf between their worldviews, was as deep and wide as any pair of presidential nominees we have ever witnessed.
Trump Truth and Kamala Consequences
One thing is certain. Trump’s unrelenting, steamrolling teardown has generated an entirely new reality, almost like a new country. But if Harris had been elevated from vice president to leader of the free world, it would undoubtedly have made all but permanent the type of nation that evolved during the Obama and Biden eras. A mandate affirming rather than rejecting what Americans lived through, especially since 2020, would be interpreted by leftists as a license to cement the “fundamental transformation of America” first promised by Barack Obama days before the 2008 election. By the time 2028 and the next presidential election rolled around, it would be too late for Trump or anyone else to enact the type of systemic change we are witnessing on a daily basis since he took the oath of office for a second and final time.
Instead, the election equated to a funeral for the progressive era, witnessed in the fading embers of DEI, globalist international policy, and borders essentially open to all comers. Just as Harris would have had her eyes on protecting the status quo while achieving permanent left-wing reforms, Trump’s new world has been designed not just for the here and now but as the final decisive nail in the left-wing coffin, enduring and largely irreversible.
Future presidents will not be in a position to reverse the paring down of the federal workforce, restore taxpayer-funded programs easily unmasked as boondoggles, or reopen a border where crossings have dropped dramatically. And assuming the Trump policies designed to privatize the economy and restore American jobs are successful in the long run, Americans will have lost any taste for the collectivist convictions of the left. One day, socialism is bound to rise again, as it does every few decades due to the left's control of the media, academia, and mainstream institutions, but it won’t be anytime soon.
Would a Harris Victory Have Been as Disastrous as the Right Believed?
For all the hysteria about the consequences of a Harris victory, would it really have been as cataclysmic for the right as Trump's triumph has been for the down-and-out left? After all, it seems every presidential election has been framed as “the most important of our lifetimes.”
Let’s start with one fundamental assumption about a Harris presidency. Donald Trump would have seen no end to the legal warfare aimed at him. Federal prosecutor Jack Smith, for one, would have been granted a long leash to nail Trump on something, anything he could dig up. Instead of becoming the 47th president, the 45th president might well have wound up behind bars.
In addition to a more open border, there would have been no concerted effort to round up criminal aliens. Sanctuary cities and states would remain as such without objection from Washington.
With Harris in charge, there is little doubt that no federal workers or programs would have gone on the chopping block. There would be no Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Leftist belief in the primacy of the public sector would have ensured the federal government became larger, not smaller. There would be no mandate for federal workers to return to their offices instead of working remotely.
The tax cuts that helped revive the economy in Trump’s first term would be allowed to expire over the objections of Republicans, whether they controlled Congress or not, certain to be the subject of a presidential veto. Corporate tax rates would almost certainly rise to new heights, or at least to their previous high levels. Taxes on the wealthy would undoubtedly increase, consistent with Harris and company’s claim that the current tax system was designed to protect the rich at the expense of the poor.
There would be no energy emergency, as Trump declared, because green energy would have taken – or held – center stage. Instead of drill-baby-drill, the spigots to all energy in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas would close down rather than open up. The so-called Green New Deal would hold sway, and energy costs for consumers would likely rise even more than they did during the Biden era.
There would be no new tariffs on imported goods, and the US would still be an active signatory to the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization. The Gulf of Mexico would still be the Gulf of Mexico.
Globalism as a prevailing policy would continue, and the remnants of America First would fall by the wayside. Given that, unlike Trump, Harris made no promises about negotiating an end to the wars in Europe and the Middle East, the conflict in Ukraine would likely carry on unabated with the US continuing to pour billions more into Ukraine’s defense for “as long as it takes,” per the promise of Joe Biden. Iran, now seemingly more vulnerable than ever, would feel emboldened by the renewal of its nuclear deal with Biden instead of its cancellation by Trump.
Ubiquitous DEI enforcement would have continued or accelerated in a Harris administration. There would continue to be a host of genders recognized by the federal government and likely businesses, rather than just the two - male and female - now officially recognized during the second Trump presidency. Efforts to pack the Supreme Court and grant statehood to liberal DC and Puerto Rico to assure near-permanent Democratic control of the Senate, which came frighteningly close to reality during Biden’s administration, might have been revived.
When viewers of cable news turn from Fox News to MSNBC, it is akin to entering two different worlds. And so it was during the 2024 presidential campaign. The contrast between the country under Trump and what it would be under his opponent is stark beyond compare. This is nothing like the distance between candidates in previous elections. If Al Gore had beaten George W. Bush in 2000 or John Kerry had done so in 2004, the country would have looked only marginally different. Even in 2008, with the rise of Obama, or in 2016, when Trump shocked Hillary Clinton, the gulf between the two nominees was narrow compared to 2024. Few would probably doubt that to say the world of today would be dramatically different if Kamala Harris were president instead of Donald Trump would be the understatement of the century.
