Character Of The Candidates

Character Of The Candidates

Character Of The Candidates

Overview


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HARRIS: Her Maltreatment of Gold Star Families
On August 26, 2024, former President Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony honoring the 13 American soldiers who had been killed-in-action because of the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous, chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan three years earlier. Neither Biden nor Harris took part in the August 26 event, but Harris, for her part, said in an X post that day: “It is not a place for politics. And yet, as was reported this week, Donald Trump’s team chose to film a video there, resulting in an altercation with cemetery staff. Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt. This is nothing new from Donald Trump. This is a man who has called our fallen service members ‘suckers’ and ‘losers’ and disparaged Medal of Honor recipients.” Harris further wrote that she, unlike Trump, “will always honor the service and sacrifice of all of America’s fallen heroes.”

In response to Harris, members of eight separate Gold Star families posted videos on X condemning her remarks and explaining that the families themselves had invited Trump to the cemetery for the ceremony – and that they had never once been contacted by Harris in the three years since the 13 service members were killed. One of those to post a video was Mark Schmitz, Gold Star father of Marine Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz. Denouncing the “heinous, vile and disgusting post put out by Kamala Harris trying to incite those that don’t follow the truth, Mark Schmitz said:

“Why did we want Trump there? It wasn’t to help his political campaign. We wanted a leader — that explains why you [Harris] and Joe [Biden] didn’t get a call. Imagine for a second that your kid is killed. There’s a president in the United States willing to take you under his wing and listen to you. That’s what we found in President Trump, certainly not you, and certainly not Joe Biden. You have 13 families who have been waiting over three years to so much as get a phone call, to so much as hear our kids’ names said aloud in the halls of Congress, the State of the Union, hell, anything. The irony behind your post, that you give a rat’s ass about our military or our veterans, Jared’s brothers and sisters in arms, the rest of the 12, their brothers and sisters in arms, is an outright lie. We’re living proof of that. You’re despicable. You have zero business running this country. And I pray to God Americans wake the hell up. and get your ass out of office. You have spit in our face for the last fucking time.” Top of FormBottom of Form

HARRIS: Her Abusive Treatment of Staffers
In November 2019, Terry McAteer, an editorial board member of the California-based newspaper The Union, provided details about Kamala Harris’ volatile character and her abusive treatment of staffers in her office when she was California’s attorney general. McAteer had learned of Harris’ bad behavior when his son Gregory secured a one-month summer internship in Harris’ office. Asserting that “how she treats her staff is as important as an individual’s legislative accomplishments,” McAteer reported the following:

“Senator Harris vocally throws around ‘F-bombs’ and other profanity constantly in her berating of staff and others. The staff is in complete fear of her and she uses her profanity throughout the day.

“As Attorney General, Senator Harris instructed her entire staff to stand every morning as she entered the office and say, ‘Good Morning General.’

“Never once during the month-long internship did Harris introduce herself to our son…. and staff was too intimidated by her to introduce him. The only acknowledgment was a form letter of ‘thanks’ signed by Harris given to him on his last day of service.

“Gregory was also given instructions to never address Harris nor look her in the eye as that privilege was only allowed to senior staff members.”

As of March 31, 2024, only 4 of the initial 47 staffers who had been hired in 2021 to work in Harris’ vice presidential office were still employed there – a 91.5% turnover rate.

HARRIS: Plagiarism
In 2009, Harris, who was preparing to run for Attorney General of California, collaborated with Joan O’C. Hamilton to co-author and publish Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. On October 14, 2024, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Rufo published an article exposing the fact that the Harris-Hamilton book contained more than a dozen significant instances of plagiarism.

Rufo notes, for example, that in the following paragraph, Harris and Hamilton “lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report.” The duplicated material appears in italics:

In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diplomaand about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.

Elsewhere the book, writes Rufo, “Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release … copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim.” Again, the duplicated material appears in italics:

High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.

The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.

“In a section about a New York court program,” Rufo adds, “Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source.” Once again, the duplicated material appears in italics:

The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community servicewhile at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.

Harris and Hamilton also reproduced the following material from an October 2000 Bureau of Justice Assistance report. The duplicated text is again indicated in italics:

Take West Palm Beach, Florida. This residential neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown struggles with a high crime rate. Although West Palm Beach is less than one mile from Palm Beach, one of the most affluent cities in the country, more than a third of the town’s residents live in poverty, and unemployment is high. The community is full of deteriorated houses and businesses, vacant lots with discarded mattresses and piles of trash, and litter strewn throughout the streets, sidewalks, yards, and parks. At the time the community considered adding a court, no new business had opened in the area, and few new houses had been built in recent years.

And in the paragraph that follows, Harris plagiarized promotional language from an Urban Institute report but elected not to cite the source. Again, the duplicated text appears in italics:

Participants meet six days a week for twelve hours a day and take part in an intensive schedule that involves classes, group learning, and group counseling designed to help them take a hard look at the violence in their lives. When the men are released after serving their sentences, they continue a six-month substance-abuse program or continue in the Post Release Education Program. The men are also required to participate in community restoration activities to begin to make amends for the impact of violence on the community; RSVP conducts workshops and discussions at high schools and other public events to increase awareness about violent crime.

HARRIS & BIDEN: Hid Iran’s Sharing of Materials Hacked from Trump Campaign
On September 18, 2024, three U.S. intelligence agencies — the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — issued a joint statement revealing that in late June and early July, Iran had hacked and “stolen” “non-public material” from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign emails and sent it, via email, to: (a) people working for the Biden-Harris campaign, and (b) various media outlets. After receiving the Iranian emails, the Biden-Harris campaign did not inform either the FBI or any other law-enforcement authority at all, but instead kept quiet about the matter.

Trump reacted to the news about the emails by writing on Truth Social: “The FBI caught Iran spying on my campaign and giving all of the information to Kamala Harris campaign. Therefore she and her campaign were illegally spying on me.”

Conservative columnist Daniel Greenfield put it this way: “The Biden-Harris campaign should have reported agents of a foreign government peddling stolen info to it. And it’s hard to believe that the sitting administration had no idea that Iran had hacked the Trump campaign. Its failure to do so is suspicious at best and treasonous at worst.”

WALZ: Lied about How He Became a Democrat
In 2004, Walz volunteered to work for Democrat Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign against George W. Bush. At the time – and for many years thereafter – Walz falsely claimed that he had become a Kerry supporter not because of any preference he had for leftwing politics, but rather, as a result of a negative experience he had been forced to endure at a pro-Bush event which he attended with two of his students in Minnesota on August 5, 2004. Some time later, in a fawning, pro-Democrat piece that was published in the January/February 2006 issue of The Atlantic magazine, author Joshua Green laid out the narrative that Walz had already begun to espouse by that time. Wrote Green:

“[A]fter they [Walz and the two students] had passed through a metal detector [at the Bush event] and their tickets and IDs were checked, they were denied admittance and ordered back onto the bus [because] one of the boys had a John Kerry sticker on his wallet. Indignant, Walz refused. […]  His challenge prompted a KGB-style interrogation that was sadly characteristic of Bush campaign events. Do you support the president? Walz refused to answer. Do you oppose the president? Walz replied that it was no one’s business but his own. […] Shortly after this, Walz retired from the [National] Guard. Then he did something that until recently was highly unusual for a military man. He announced he was running for Congress—as a Democrat.”

But the chain of events described by Walz and memorialized by Joshua Green was entirely fictitious, as evidenced by photographs that later surfaced showing Walz displaying an “Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry” placard while participating in a pre-arranged protest against the August 5, 2004 Bush rally. (Note: “Operation Enduring Freedom” was America’s post-9/11 military operation in Afghanistan.)

WALZ: Falsely Claimed to Have Been in China During Tiananmen Square Massacre
Over the course of his adult years, Walz has said many times that he was in Hong Kong during — not after — the Tiananmen Square protests in which the Communist Chinese government slaughtered thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in the spring of 1989. But on October 1, 2024, various media outlets began to reveal that Walz had not in fact traveled to China until August of 1989.

WALZ: Stolen Valor
In 2005, Walz retired from the Army National Guard after 24 years of service, having achieved the rank of Master Sergeant, or E-8 (Eighth Enlisted Grade). But at that time – and for many years thereafter – Walz’s official website biography identified him as having attained the higher rank of Command Sergeant Major, or E-9. However, Walz held that more prestigious title only briefly before it was rescinded because of his failure to complete all the requirements upon which it was contingent. Specifically, he served only 4 of the 6 years which in 2001 he had pledged to the Minnesota Army National Guard, abruptly retiring in May 2005 after learning that his battalion would soon be deployed to a combat zone in Iraq. His early departure caused his rank at retirement to be reduced to Master Sergeant. In a November 2, 2018 letter published in the West Central Tribune, two retired Army Command Sergeant Majors — Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr — explained the nature of Walz’s actions and misrepresentation of his rank:

“The bottom line in all of this is gut wrenching and sad to explain. When the nation called, he [Walz] quit. He failed to complete the United States Army Sergeants Major Academy…. He failed to fulfill the full six years of the enlistment he signed on September 18th, 2001. He failed his country. He failed his state. He failed the Minnesota Army National Guard, the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion, and his fellow Soldiers. And he failed to lead by example. Shameful.”

WALZ: Additional False Military Claims
When Walz first ran for Congress in 2006, his initial campaign announcement identified him as “a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom,” a title widely understood to signify someone who had served on the ground in Afghanistan, or in the airspace above Afghanistan, post-9/11. But Walz had never done either of those things, having spent his time instead in Italy working “in support” of Operation Enduring Freedom, and in Norway working in support of NATO forces.

Eighteen years later, while campaigning as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate in 2024, Walz, calling for “common sense” gun-control legislation, advocated a ban on the kind of weapons “that I carried in war.” But in fact, he had never seen active combat during his military service. When a reporter subsequently asked Walz to explain why he had falsely claimed to have been “in war,” he replied that “my grammar is not always correct.”

TRUMP: Falsely Accused of Racism
Joe Biden flatly called Donald Trump a “racist” during the first presidential debate of 2020. In a similar spirit, Senator Bernie Sanders has stated: “We  have a president who is, in fact, a racist and a bigot.” These are just two of countless examples where leading Democrats have smeared President Trump as a racist.

The most famous and noteworthy charge of “racism” that has been leveled at Trump is the allegation that he issued racist remarks in the aftermath of the August 12, 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That event was originally organized for the explicit purpose of protesting the proposed removal, from a local park, of an equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. According to various reports, the protesters were composed of two very distinct and dissimilar contingents of people:

  • aggressiveand hateful white supremacists with neo-Nazi sympathies
  • others who had no racial or anti-Semitic animus and simply wished to voice their disapprovalregarding the Lee statue’s removal

Meanwhile, a large group of counter-protesters likewise included two very distinct and dissimilar contingents:

  • those who supported the statue’s removal and wished to make their feelings known in a nonviolent public forum
  • hundreds of other people who were affiliated with Antifa, a revolutionary Marxist/anarchist militia movement advocating the use of violence to raze America’s existing society to the ground.

Shortly after a violent clash between opposing factions at the rally resulted in the death of one attendee, President Trump issued a statement saying: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides — on many sides.” On August 14, Trump said: “We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans. Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans…. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.” On August 15, President Trump held a televised press conference where he said:

  • “[Y]ou had a group on one side [the neo-Nazis] that was bad, and you had a group on the other side [Antifa] that was also very violent.”
  • “I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those [pro-statue] people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch.”
  • “I think there’s blame on both sides.”
  • “[Y]ou have some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group … that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue.”
  • “And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers [Antifa] and … a lot of bad people.”

Trump’s detractors zeroed in mainly on his assertion that there had been “blame on both sides,” as well as some “very fine people on both sides,” at the site of the August 12 protest. The critics maliciously misrepresented what Trump had said, to make it seem as though he had referred to neo-Nazis as “very fine people.” Joe Biden, for example, has repeatedly – and fraudulently — claimed that Trump’s “very fine people” remarks were what caused him (Biden) to run for president in 2020.

TRUMP: Falsely Accused of Being Anti-Hispanic
A major New York Times piece titled “Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List” charges that “during a White House meeting in 2018, [Trump] referred to some undocumented immigrants as ‘animals.’” Leading Democrats, too, have complained vocally about Trump having equated immigrants with “animals.” At a town hall meeting in South Carolina, for example, Joe Biden lamented that Trump had maligned “migrants seeking refuge in America” by saying “these aren’t people, these are animals.”

But in fact, Trump’s reference to “animals” was actually made in direct response to Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims’ complaint that immigration-law restrictions were preventing her from informing federal authorities that certain deportable, illegal-alien members of the brutally violent and murderous MS-13 gang were being housed, at that very moment, in a Fresno prison. It was in response to that reality, that Trump made his famous “animals” remark. To any honest observer, it would have been quite obvious that Trump was not referring to “undocumented” or “unauthorized” immigrants generally, but to MS-13 members specifically.

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