By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
If there was ever a more radical contrast in a White House than what Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris and Republican presidential contender Donald Trump offer the nation, it’s hard to imagine. To hear Trump tell it, Harris is a far left radical, even Marxist-tinged potential destroyer of the American system.
To hear Harris tell it, Trump is a fascist, dictatorial, autocrat potential destroyer of the American system.
Putting aside the hard-nosed campaign lambasting of each other, the only pertinent question is just what their White Houses offer the nation.
There has been much guesswork about Harris’s more than two decades of political office holding. She was variously branded a moderate, liberal progressive, a consummate political insider and a political chameleon prone to change, even flip flop, on positions. None of these descriptions did much to help determine exactly what a Harris White House would look like and mean for the country.
Harris added her own tiny element of mystery about her governance once in the Oval Office in a 2019 interview with the New York Times. “Policy has to be relevant,” she said. “That’s my guiding principle: Is it relevant? Not, is it a beautiful sonnet?”
The Harris White House, then, will be a careful blend of Joe Biden’s administration policies. It will tweak, modify, add onto and in some cases depart from those policies on the major foreign and domestic issues from immigration to abortion to the economy.
It will defend transgender rights and labor protections. It will stress racial and gender diversity in staff, cabinet and agency appointments.
It will select moderate to liberal jurists for federal judiciary appointments and particularly the Supreme Court. It will revisit with Congress passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Harris will be confronted with and battle continuously against fierce Republican congressional opposition. She will be forced, as Barack Obama was, because of the stiff congressional intransigence by Republicans who will duck, dodge, stall and subvert her agenda, forcing her to issue lots of executive orders on key policy issues.
The military will continue to get every penny and more it demands for in its already gargantuan budget. It will receive virtually all its requests for military hardware and technology.
The Harris White House then will have some resemblance to an Obama and Biden White House. But with small and in some places significant changes as issues arise. Pragmatism will be the watchword of her White House.
That approach to governance was summed up by one of her former top staff aides.
“She’s someone who thinks about the user experience of government, how it works, how it operates, how people are experiencing it, and she wants to make it better in literal ways, as opposed to theory.”
On the other hand, Trump has vowed to finish the job he started during his first term. The “great” part was his big, sweeping, no holds barred program to remake America in the most radical political blend of hard core right and populist ideology that had come down the pike in American political history.
Trump has vowed to mass deport every undocumented immigrant alleged or accused of any crime, to pump billions more into border enforcement and to use every federal law enforcement agency to stop the flow of illegal immigrants.
He would do away with the Department of Education and let the states and parents handle all matters about education policies and practices at all levels from who gets to teach and administrate to how the money would be spent. He would ban any interference with religious practices. He would end all race-based teaching and programs with special emphasis on eradicating anything that smacked of teaching critical race theory.
Trump would again try to do something about his signature pet peeve. That was former President Obama’s landmark Affordable Health Care Act. He was blunt.
“Getting much better health care than Obamacare for the American people will be a priority of the Trump administration.”
He would gut every pollution control rule and regulation on the books. Trump made clear that he would give the oil and gas industry free reign to exploit public lands to extract oil and gas with no regulatory constraints. As Trump crudely put it, “We’re going to ‘drill, baby, drill’ right away.”
He would turn the heat up even higher on the Justice Department. He would emphasize that the department solely focus on prosecuting violent criminals.
He would be the number one booster of an America First policy on jobs and trade. That supposedly would radically reduce reliance on Chinese imported goods, clamp massive tariffs on foreign-made goods, and stop cold China and other countries from grabbing bigger shares of America’s financial and corporate structure.
Trump would almost certainly continue to saber rattle with NATO, presumably on the cost issue during a second term. However, there is little likelihood that the U.S.-NATO alliance would fracture let alone crumble with a U.S. exit. The Russian threat of European expansionism looms too large for the U.S. to slacken its support of NATO.
No matter whether it was a domestic or foreign policy issue, this can be said with certainty. A Trump or Harris White House offers Americans the most radical contrast in American political history.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest two books are “The Harris White House” and “President Trump’s America” (Middle Passage Press). He also is the host of the weekly The Hutchinson Report Facebook Livesteam.
