3 Snapshots: The Garbage Man, Women Standing Up, An Inspiring Message

Three quick takes on these final days of the 2024 election

The garbage man. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images)

It’s a fitting end to the filthy outpouring that is the Donald Trump campaign that he thought he was so smart by climbing into a garbage truck. He’s the one who’s called the people around Vice President Kamala Harris “absolute garbage,” called America “a garbage can” and included a so-called “comedian” at his Madison Square Garden hatefest last Sunday who referred to Puerto Rico as “an island of garbage.”

Trump thought he was demeaning President Joe Biden, who was misinterpreted as calling Trump supporters garbage when he actually was just talking about the one supporter and his attack on Puerto Rico. (All he was trying to say, Biden said, is that the “demonization of Latinos is unconscionable.”) But by struggling to get into the garbage truck and further associating himself with garbage, Trump didn’t own the president, the libs or the Harris campaign.

It was one hell of a self-own.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)

Speaking of self-owns, the downward-spiraling Trump proudly insisted yesterday that he rejected his campaign staff’s advice to stop claiming that he wants to protect women. “I’m going to do it,” he boasted, “whether the women like it or not.” This from an adjudicated rapist with a history of predatory and abusive behavior toward women.

VP Harris was quick to respond, calling the Trump remarks “very offensive” and indicative of “not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies.”

But Harris is already providing the real counterpoint to the sexism of her rival. A tracking of early ballot returns by NBC News has found that 54 percent of the 58 million mail-in and early in-person votes have been cast by women and just 44 percent by men. In addition, there’s at least a 10-point gap between women and men in the battleground states of Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina with the widest gender gap in Pennsylvania (56 to 43 percent). Even Trump enablers are acknowledging that if this doesn’t change and there’s not greater male turnout, “it’s over.”

Screenshot from new Harris campaign ad

Speaking of women and Harris’ message of freedom, the campaign has released a new ad that employs some of the most powerful words from her speech at the Ellipse Tuesday night. It’s part of her closing message in these final days—and a note of inspiration—as Americans cast their ballots.

“Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant,” the vice president says. “Across the generations, Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing proved to the world that a government of, by and for the people is strong and can endure. And those who came before us, they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms to the will of another petty tyrant.”

In four days, we will begin to learn whether Americans heard her call and refused to allow a hateful, petty tyrant rule them for the next four years. And if these days are filled with anxiety? Perhaps you should give a read to my snapshot essay earlier this week urging us all not to panic about the election—and, as Michelle Obama has urged, “do something.”

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