I received a Facebook message written by an old friend whom I went to high school with back in the Midwest. She now lives in an affluent exurb of D.C. She’s been a brilliant success in the real estate marketing and development business and deals with movers and shakers on a day-to-day basis. She’s no dolt.

She can’t understand how anyone could have voted for Donald Trump. (It reminded me of the quote attributed to the late film critic Pauline Kael in 1972. Pauline couldn’t understand how Nixon won the 1972 election. No one she knew had voted for him.) My friend went through a whole list of why he shouldn’t be President: misogynist, rapist, felon, impeached twice, bigot, and his “hateful plans for retribution and dictatorship.” The veracity of her comments is the subject of another column. But let’s just say that she laid out the same reasons that numerous liberal pundits on the alphabet networks have stated: That Trump is the devil incarnate.

It wasn’t what she said in her post that got me thinking. It was what she didn’t say that caught my attention. Not one time in her three-paragraph rant did she mention his opponent. Not once.

The reason many people voted for Trump can easily be answered with two words -- Kamala Harris.

It’s been said that Kamala Harris is an empty pantsuit with a head to match. It’s hard to argue with that assessment. If you listened to her speeches, you heard two basic themes. The first was a list of touchy-feely platitudes that could have been taken out of a 1970s self-help book. (Let’s not forget that she was raised by hippie intellectuals.) The other part of her public proclamations was full of hyperbolic hate for the man she was running against. If I had a nickel for every time the words Fascist, Nazi, and Hitler were used, I could buy an empty storefront in dilapidating San Francisco. The only time Kamala ventured into the field of policy was when she was stealing it from Trump (i.e., no tax on tips) or when she suggested that the cure for inflation was price controls (On that last suggestion, the nation’s economists’ heads were spinning at 1000 RPM).

Kamala also had a knack for alienating people. She managed to PO Catholics, Muslims, and Jews all at the same time. How is that even possible? According to the Miami Herald, Catholics gave Trump 58% of their vote. He also garnered 43% of the vote in Hamtramck, Michigan, which has a majority of Muslims. And Trump got a 50% increase in Jewish voters in New York. Kamala even managed to drive away Hispanic voters with her border wall policies. Trump carried the most Hispanic county in the country -- Starr County, Texas, gave Trump 58% of the vote. That’s the first time a Republican candidate has carried that county since 1892!

My friend’s comments accentuated the fact that wealthy liberals (especially in the D.C. area) have for so long been isolated from real America that they don’t know what most Americans are feeling these days. For the last three-plus years, we’ve dealt with the Biden-Harris Administration giving their blessing to boys in the girls’ locker room, regular folks having to buy only half a tank of gas to have enough money left over to buy lunch, or reading about unvetted immigrants killing and raping our citizens while feeding at the government trough.

I had another Facebook friend who posted anti-Trump memes during the summer months and fall. Not one time did he post a pro-Harris meme. That’s probably because he couldn’t think of one or find one. I think Ben Shapiro said it best: “You can argue against Trump; you can argue for him. But nobody can credibly argue in favor of Kamala Harris.”

There’s an old saying in politics that you can’t beat a somebody with a nobody. While Kamala wasn’t exactly a nobody, she didn’t offer any viable alternative to the voters. I believe what ultimately pushed Trump over the top was not what he was, but what Kamala wasn’t.

Image: AT via Magic Studio