pretense

Now that Trump is headed back to the White House, with X’s Elon Musk in tow, there is not even a pretense of hope on that platform for anyone who voted against Trump.

But one of them has run a ragged, undisciplined and often listless campaign, increasingly focused on blatantly false claims and hateful invective, and without the slightest pretense of “moderation” or unifying rhetoric.

I’ll say it plainly, then, and dispense with the pretense: Based on nothing but my own want, I predict Kamala Harris will win this election.

In the campaign’s final week, Trump returned to New York to feed his ego and the hate of a party that seems to have lost all pretense of wanting a democracy.

But it is also true more broadly: Liberal democracy’s protections like the freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion can’t keep American Jews safe if leaders use American Jews’ safety as a pretense to dismantle liberal democracy—the preservation of which is the most important issue to American Jews this election, according to multiple polls.