I know it’s a little late, but I did come up with the perfect meme for the Harris campaign: “There is nothing wrong with this country that Donald Trump won’t make worse.” Because it is true.

Tony Hinchcliffe, a man who is as good at comedy as Trump was at running the country, says that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage”. (He also said that Hispanics really like to have babies and compared their sexual practices to their “invasion” of the country by people who won’t pull out, but no one seems to talk about that.) Trump’s response to this attempt at humor by saying “Tony Who?” and that he had never even heard of the guy. Well…….

You know that people don’t speak at a culminating rally at Madison Square Garden after being invited to say whatever they wanted to say (“Just surprise us. We don’t care what you say. We trust you”). And you know that Trump knew exactly who was speaking at this mother of all rallies, and for how much time and in what order. But do we think that Trump himself vetted the Hinchcliffe (does his name even make you shutter and think of Wuthering Heights?)? Probably not, because that would require reading.

But someone did. The Hinchcliffe speech was not ad lib (or ad hoc, or ad anything else); he was reading it from a teleprompter. And from what I have seen, it had been carefully vetted, with some of Hinchcliffe’s proposed “jokes” being taken out of the speech for going too far. The Puerto Rico garbage joke was allowed to remain.

Okay, but what about the Biden remark about the only garbage being Trump’s supporters? That was not on any teleprompter. It was an ad lib remark made by Joe Biden, a man long noted, among other things, for his skill at malapropism. Beyond that, it was an impromptu remark made by someone that the Republicans have for months (years, really) been saying was in cognitive decline and didn’t know what he was saying or doing. But now, an off-the-cuff Biden comment becomes not only the most important thing he has ever said, but undoubtedly shows what Kamala Harris (not just Joe Biden) thinks about Trump supporters. Yes, clearly anything Biden says is really being said by Harris. Why can’t you see that?

A headline from this morning’s Wall Street Journal: “The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy”. I think this is true. All the numbers point upward, except for inflation and unemployment, which point downward. Money for years of infrastructure work has already been approved and much of it already appropriated. Barring a surprise, the economy under the next President should do well.

Of course, this was also the case when Donald Trump took over from Barack Obama in 2016. Obama said this a few weeks ago (and probably every day since) in a Harris campaign speech – Donald Trump’s economy for the first two years was really “my” economy. And the next President’s economy for the first two years or so will be Joe Biden’s economy. (By the way, when Biden was elected, one of my reactions was – boy, it’s going to take him a long time to straighten out things after four years of Trump; I think I was right, and I think he has done a good job under bad conditions, but you can’t do it in four years.)

If Trump does win the election, he may not build on the Biden economy, but instead tank it. He does have some radical plans, even putting Project 2025 to the side (which you can’t really do, of course).

It is frightening to listen to Elon Musk, for example, who says that his plan to cut billions or trillions of out government spending will cause some economic hardships to average Americans for a while (but they have become too dependent on the government, he says, anyway), as Musk’s plans are to cut all social service programs drastically and to fire thousands and thousands of government employees. Trump’s response to this is nothing short of magical: yes, we will cut everything that Musk wants to cut, but guess what? Americans won’t feel it at all. They won’t even know it is happening.

And then there is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his plans to become czar of all health related agencies – HHS, NIH, CDC, FDA, etc. And Trump said, did he not, that he would let Kennedy “go wild on health”, or something like that? Kennedy, who wants to ban all vaccines, and who once said that Covid-19 was designed to hit Blacks hard and spare most Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.

Did you see Kaitlin Collins (along with Abby Phillips, my new favorites) interview Howard Lutnick last night? Lutnick is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald (more on that below) and is the transition chair for Trump, in charge of finding and vetting individuals filling the more than 1,000 jobs in a new administration that require Senate approval. It was Saturday Night Live again. Lutnick (whom I used to have a lot of respect for) talked about how he went to (I don’t remember the exact number) 100 people he knew, and asked them to each recommend 5 people they knew, and asked each of them to recommend 5 people they knew, so that he had thousands of people for these jobs, 5 to 8 for each, I think he said. And they were each the best, and any of them could handle the jobs that he would convince them to take.

Of course, he said, neither Musk or Kennedy would be “in” the new administration. Trump says that Musk would be in his cabinet, right? Well, says Lutnick, Musk can’t give up Space X; he will be on the outside. Trump says that Kennedy is going to control public health policy (and of course, Kennedy has also said that Trump has promised him that), but Lutnick laughs and shows his winning smile (really a winning smile; that he does have) and says, no, no, no. That won’t happen. Kennedy just wants to see data, not to control personnel or agencies. He just wants to see the data that will enable him to convince everyone that vaccines cause autism! Look, says Lutnick – we used to have few vaccines and little autism. Now we have many vaccines and a lot of autism. Doesn’t that prove it?

And, okay, you can’t really put aside Project 2025, can you? Who needs the weather bureau? Why can’t abortion be banned nationwide? On and on and on.

But yes, there is a lot wrong with the way this country is governed, much of it caused by archaic provisions in our holier-than-thou Constitution. But let’s not forget – there is nothing wrong with this country that Donald Trump cannot make worse. None of us know what Tuesday’s election will bring. But we do know that.

(By the way, Lutnick’s brokerage firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, which was hit so badly when the Twin Towers were hit and 70% or so of their employees were killed, was created by a man named Bernard Cantor. His father was Gerald Cantor – hence the name of the firm. No Scottish Fitzgeralds involved.)