Unlike Kamala Harris, I don’t often use the word ‘holistic’. Like Kamala Harris, I believe that, as often as not, different parts of a complex whole are interconnected, which may justify the use of that word, much as I dislike it.
Now, holistically speaking, I’m convinced that the way a person talks is a reliable indication of the thought process involved.
Someone who speaks in perfectly parsed, logically connected sentences with clear antecedents and with each word used in its precise meaning may not be a profound thinker. But at least he is a lucid one, a quality Somerset Maugham rated above all else.
Conversely, when someone forces a listener to ask what on earth he’s trying to say, or makes a reader go over the same sentence several times attempting to disentangle the convoluted verbal mess, that person isn’t a thinker at all. His only excuse may be that he is a German philosopher but, as Schopenhauer showed, it’s possible to overcome even that congenital defect and still produce lucid prose.
Looking at the two presidential candidates from that angle, I can say that Trump may make me sad, but Harris makes me desperate.
Trump’s crude, semi-literate speech betokens a primitive, undisciplined mind. Even his body English is ungrammatical and full of solecisms. But at least he is always concise and to the point, leaving the audience in no doubt about his message.
The other day he even showed that he may eventually learn how to speak diplomatically, which is a useful skill for someone in charge of a country’s foreign policy. On meeting PM Starmer, Trump said that the latter is a “nice man” who “did very well. It’s very early but he is popular.”
I don’t know how closely Trump follows British politics, or indeed how well he understands it. However, I’m sure his advisers must have told him that Starmer’s popularity is dropping faster than Princess Di’s knickers in her heyday.
In fact, Starmer has to represent everything Trump loathes in establishment politicians. Sir Keir is a high-spending, high-taxing woke socialist with strong globalist inclinations and an unquenchable thirst for punishing (and banishing) the rich.
Trump’s pronouncements, crude though they are, and also his actions when in the White House suggest that it took a big effort for him to say something polite about Starmer. Yet he did make that effort, which indicates some bow towards proper politics.
Moreover, Prime Minister Starmer was accompanied at that meeting by Foreign Secretary Lammy, whom one can safely describe as not one of Trump’s most ardent admirers. In fact, Lammy campaigned for cancelling the president’s 2018 visit to the UK. Donald Trump, according to David Lammy, was a “dangerous clown” and a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath.”
This sort of thing says more about Lammy than Trump, but that’s a comparatively minor matter. For everything I know about Trump suggests that he doesn’t suffer personal insults with equanimity. If there is one adjective that always crops up in connection with Trump, it’s ‘narcissistic’, and narcissists tend to lash out at the slightest manifestation of opprobrium.
However, he didn’t call Lammy any pejorative names, racist or otherwise, and by all accounts behaved in a civilised, some will even say presidential, manner. That’s a move in the right direction, although I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Trump talked to his retinue after the meeting.
By contrast to Mr Trump, Miss Harris doesn’t say many crude things, doesn’t make savage remarks about the opposite sex and doesn’t often swear at her political opponents. Yet one almost wishes she did.
For things she does say, on the rare occasions when she isn’t flanked by aids whispering in her ear, shouldn’t qualify her to be elected even the proverbial dog catcher.
I don’t know much about her specific plans for foreign and domestic policy (does anyone?), because she restricts herself to generalities and platitudes. One can surmise, on little hard evidence, that her politics are as close to Starmer’s as possible in the context of US politics.
Yet what she says, however little that may be, is nowhere as important as how she says it. It’s that holistic aspect of her speech, to use Kamala’s favourite adjective, that proves her incompetence. No one capable of uttering the two passages below can be trusted to run the nation that Trump wants to make great again.
In reverse order, the first one comes from Kamala’s rare solo TV interview the other day, while the second pearl popped out of its shell earlier this month:
“For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritising affordable housing for working people.”
And,
“The trauma that exists in communities around the violence of losing their children, losing a brother, losing a father, an uncle – all of that must be addressed, and we have to have a holistic response to it. It’s about understanding what we need to do to, again, understand that, to your point, we have to have a holistic response to this issue and prioritise it, instead of reacting to the tragedy that, sadly, they are too predictable.”
Someone else could accuse Kamala of misogyny: the only losses, other than “their children”, she mentioned were those of male relations. What happened to losing a sister, a mother or an aunt? Is losing a female person less tragic? You see, like Donald Trump, I too am learning alien ways, in this case trying to use the debating logic of our woke modernity.
But relying on my more natural way of thinking, I can state with absolute certainty that a politician capable of delivering the two passages above has no business being a politician – of any kind, never mind a US president.
Kamala got hold of a key word, ‘holistic’, and used it as the axis around which her thought revolved. It’s the sort of thing third-rate barristers do: basing their defence in a mass murder case on the abuse suffered by the defendant as a child, they’ll stick ‘abused’ into every sentence.
America – and what’s left of the free world – can’t afford a third-rate thinker in the White House any more than a defendant can afford a third-rate lawyer. Kamala has had her stint as the latter, and I hope American voters are wise enough not to let her have a shot at the former.
You might have gathered that none of this is a ringing endorsement of Donald Trump. It is, however, a ringing endorsement of the lesser evil. That’s the best we can hope for these days.