Trump and Harris are poles apart - as politicians and personalities
American voters face the starkest choice since the Civil War.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump could hardly be more different as people and candidates to be President of the United States.
For a start he’s a man, she’s a woman. Americans have only had the chance to elect a woman president once before in 2016 when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. There have only been two other women on the ticket for the main Republican and Democratic parties: Geraldine Ferraro who ran unsuccessfully as Walter Mondale’s vice presidential pick in 1984 and Sarah Palin who was John McCain’s ticket at VP in the 2008 election, but lost to the Obama-Biden ticket.
Then there’s the race question. All previous candidates have been white with European ancestry – except for Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan and whose mother was a white woman from Illinois.
Donald John Trump shares the typical WASP – White Anglo Saxon Protestant - background of almost all previous candidates. Trump’s father Fred was the descendant of German immigrants whose family name was Trumpf. His mother was born Mary Ann MacLeod in Scotland. Donald was the fourth of their five children, with two brothers and two sisters. His father was a property developer mostly in the Queens borough of New York City, who eventually handed over his business to Donald. Both parents are deceased.
Kamala Devi Harris is a person of colour. Both her parents were first generation immigrants. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, came from India to study biology, followed by a 40-year career in North America as a researcher and endocrinologist. She largely brought up Kamala and her younger sister Maya as a single parent, including for five years in Canada while she worked for McGill University. Shyamala died of colon cancer in 2009.
Harris’s father, Donald J Harris, is now 86 years old and an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University. Trump calls him “a Marxist”; in fact, he is on the left but a post-Keynesian. Donald Harris came to the US from Jamaica in 1961. Kamala’s parents separated when she was five and divorced a few years later. She is estranged from her father and seldom sees him. She did mention him in her acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention this year: “At the park, my mother would say, 'Stay close.' But my father would say, as he smiled, 'Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.' From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless.”
Kamala Harris stands five foot four and a quarter inches “or 5’7 and a half in heels - which I always wear, thank you very much”. Estimates of Trump’s height vary from 6’4 to 5’10. At 17 stone, Trump was the third heaviest president after William Howard Taft. Only James Madison was lighter than Harris’s ten stones. Both candidates claim to be in excellent health.
Trump has five adult children by three wives, two of whom were immigrants from Eastern Europe. Harris rebutted JD Vance's “childless cat women” jibe by pointing out that she is very close to her nieces and to her two step children by her husband Doug Emhoff. During the furore Emhoff’s first wife came out publicly to commend Harris’s co-parenting. Emhoff, who is Jewish, is currently America’s first “Second Gentleman” and may become the nation’s first “First Gentleman”.
Both wannabe presidents have become fashion icons. Trump is world famous for his blue suits, from the Italian designer Brioni, and his red satin neck ties which long come from his own Trump fashion range and are mostly manufactured in China.
Both women wear pant suits but unlike Hillary Clinton’s “I’m with her” campaign, Kamala Harris has chosen not to make an issue of her gender. Following Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, she has adopted blouses with pussy bows for her main appearances such as the TV debate. According to The New York Times, which devoted a lengthy article to the subject, the pussy bow blouse dates back to the court of Louis XIV and “has been a tool of covert sartorial diplomacy. Feminine but not sexual, masculine but not threatening, it functions both as camouflage for women entering traditional male spaces and as a statement of intent”.
The rival nominees have opposite outlooks – and a significant age gap. He is a 78-year-old baby boomer, she is 60, 18 years younger. From a new generation, she would be the first US President in a hundred years for whom the World Wars and the Cold War which followed will not have been formative influences.
Their favourite films and music show up their generational differences. Trump is rooted in the 1970s and before. He likes Mafia movies such as The Godfather and Goodfellas as well as Citizen Kane, The Good the Bad and The Ugly, and Gone with the Wind. At his rallies, he goes for mainstream rock music from the last century.
Harris chose the 1992 court room rom-com My Cousin Vinnie as her favourite movie. She also has an impressive knowledge of super hero franchises, especially Black Panther. She chose Beyoncé’s Freedom as her campaign anthem. From Beyoncé to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harris has her pick of endorsements from most showbusiness celebrities. Trump must make do with Roseanne Barr and crustier male stars such as Hulk Hogan, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight.
Trump comes from the East Coast and owns golf courses across the Atlantic in Scotland. Even though he has decamped to Florida - the New Yorker’s retirement playground - Trump, the suburban New Yorker, regards Manhattan as the centre of the universe. That is why, in his final run for the presidency, he held a rally in Madison Square Garden, even though he stands little chance of winning New York State.
Trump’s businesses have gone bankrupt numerous times, but he regards himself as a king capitalist and grand master of “The Art of the Deal”, the title of his ghosted best-selling book. He takes credit for forcing European members to pay more into NATO by threatening to pull the US out of the defence organisation. If elected he says he will broker a deal between Putin and Zelensky.
Harris is from the Pacific West Coast. She has built her career as an elected official in the public sector. She was an attorney and prosecutor in San Francisco before being elected to Washington DC as US Senator for California. She has formed close ties going back decades with California’s prominent political dynasties including the Pelosis and the Newsoms. As a young woman, she had a relationship with Willie Brown, an African American power broker thirty years her senior. Her experience was domestic until she served as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. As Biden’s vice president, she has travelled widely, including to the UK. Her national security advisor Philip H Gordon is a European specialist and staunch supporter of aid to Ukraine.
In spite of the deep polarisation of the American electorate, the two candidates perhaps come closest to each other in economic policy. Both would cut taxes and increase borrowing. Like Joe Biden, Harris would keep some of the tariffs on China introduced last time by Trump, but she would not increase them as he intends. Their tax breaks would be aimed at different sections of the economy.
Both say they would tighten border security against illegal migration but only Trump says he would use the military to enforce mass deportations.
The sharpest division is over women’s health rights. Harris plans to restore the nationwide right to abortion and birth control. Trump appointed the US Supreme Court which abolished it and says decisions about abortion rights should be left to the states.
Trump has repeatedly listed the “enemies within” who he plans to persecute if he is re-elected. Harris says she wants to be a president for all Americans who should fear her "unstable, unhinged and unchecked” opponent.
When she was a prosecutor in California, Harris risked her career by refusing to ask for the death penalty for a cop killer. Trump took out full pay advertisements demanding the execution of the Central Park Five, who turned out to be innocent. One of his final acts as president was to speed up the killing of those on Federal death row.
Donald Trump or Kamala Harris? Americans face their starkest choice since the Civil War ever in this election.