Sharing a conversation featuring conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens in which Stephens declared he would cast his 2024 presidential vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) described his take on the Harris campaign:
“Kamala Harris is charting a new path forward with an opportunity economy for all Americans,” Lieu asserted. “And she’s not bleeping crazy.”
Kamala Harris is charting a new path forward with an opportunity economy for all Americans.
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) October 22, 2024
And she’s not bleeping crazy.
Time to turn the page on Trump. https://t.co/PsJJokxhqP
The second part of that praise — Harris’s sanity in counterpoint to the mentality of her opponent, Donald Trump — comes directly from Stephens who, enamored of neither candidate, contends that his decision is nevertheless easy because: “Donald Trump is literally bleeping crazy. And what crazy brings in its wake is JD Vance, whom I find worse than Trump, because he’s just as cynical but twice as bright.”
Stephens also despairs over the Trump MAGA movement’s synergy with alleged Putin asset Tucker Carlson and the “Hitler defenders he likes to platform.”
Lieu knows how X posts work — that few people actually click through to read what’s shared — since in this case he’s linking to a conversation in which Stephens says things like: “I fear that Harris is every bit as vacuous behind the scenes as she seems to be on the public stage.”
Holding fast to his “Reagan conservative” identity, Stephens contends that he is, in fact, consumed by fear about a Harris presidency, starting seven straight sentences with “I fear” and proceeding to rattle off a bevy of doom scenarios without specifying his reasons for all that fear, except that Harris is not Ronald Reagan.
Still, the unfitness of Trump leads Stephens to face his Harris fears head on and to cast his blue vote for the Democrat. Trump has a “character I detest,” Stephens says, one which crucially will not abide the Constitution when it is inconvenient — which is one fear Stephens does not harbor about Harris, trusting her adherence to law and order.
Stephens says he hopes this election, and his vote, will help “drive a stake into the heart of Trumpism.” Lieu puts it more delicately when he writes: “It’s time to turn the page on Trump.”
