Imagine how much better off we'd be right now

In a world that feels like it just might fall off the edge, imagine how much better off we’d all be right now if Kamala Harris had been elected president in 2024 …

Let’s explore the “what ifs” for the next few minutes and have a brief discussion at the end.

What follows is an incomplete list featuring just some of the things that would have made America a far, far better place to live under a Harris administration, than it is right now under this ghastly, heartless regime that is taking a wrecking ball to our country, our rights, and the White House.

It also doesn’t hurt to have a list like this at the ready to throw in the faces of the self-suffocating dummies who would still rather choke to death than admit they had it all wrong about the orange, America-attacking bigot who can never do enough to please himself.

So here goes:

• If Kamala Harris had been elected president healthcare premiums would be cheaper not more expensive.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president our environment would be protected from despicable corporate raiders, who have been given the green flag to pollute our air and water, and slaughter our animals.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president gas would be cheaper, but more importantly, alternative energies would be championed that would create jobs, make energy cheaper, and the environment cleaner.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president we would have been building on our relationships throughout the world and strengthening NATO instead of trying to poison it. We wouldn’t be kissing Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban’s fascist asses, and democracies like Ukraine would get our full support and not condemnation.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president the American Pope could be bragging about his native country, instead of using scripture to troll the AntiChrist, Trump.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president we wouldn’t be in Iran, and would be pushing for peace in the Middle East and against Israel’s reprehensible and lawless leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president she would be using her bully pulpit to protect the most American thing there is, our vote, and pushing to finally get the John Lewis Voting Rights act passed.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president prices would have continued to decrease, and there would be no idiotic tariffs that have made them rise.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president more of our children would be better fed, better clothed, and better educated. There would have been an expansion of the $6,000 child tax credit that Trump just couldn’t wait to eliminate to pay off his billionaire buddies.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president Jeffrey Epstein’s victims would be protected, instead of the rapists who attacked them. She also wouldn’t be mentioned tens of thousands of times in those odious files like the slobbery Trump.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president the Kennedy Center would be open for business and thriving by showing off the wonderful arts. It would still be called the The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts because only a no-talent, ignorant, narcissistic maniac would think of slapping his name on the place.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president the White House would be a shining beacon on a hill, not a demolition site.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president we wouldn’t hear from her every other hour, because she would be working hard on behalf of ALL Americans instead of trolling and insulting more than half of them on her phone.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president the destructive Project 2025 would have been ceremoniously placed in some shredder, and Russell Vought would be dating Eric Trump.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president she would have assembled a competent, qualified cabinet that represented America’s finest, instead of a collection of old, rich white men who look as if they just fell off the patio of some walled-off, snobby country club.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president billionaires would be taxed at far, far higher rates than the working folks in America.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president she would have worked on behalf of women, instead of against them, and used her enormous power to make abortion legal everywhere again, and equal pay a damn priority.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president she would have banned corporate price gouging on food, which is treated like a luxury item by this rotten regime.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president the bipartisan border bill would have become law, and ICE would have been dismantled instead of menacing and murdering innocent people in our streets, schools, stores, hospitals and airports.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president she would have pushed for common sense gun legislation that finally banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president she would have spoken loudly against the Supreme Court’s absurd, pro-king, anti-American decision that crooked presidents like Trump are immune from being charged for crimes they commit in office.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president she would have pursued paid family and medical leave that every other damn civilized country on earth provides their citizens.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president she would have pursued passing a pro-labor act that protects unions and the working folks of America, not attack them.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president she would have finally legalized marijuana making it safer to consume, while generating significant tax revenue to pay for any number of worthy causes.
• If Kamala Harris had been elected president we wouldn’t be worried about the end of civilization itself.

I’ll stop there at 25.

Like I said, this is only a partial list, but I hope this bright and shiny quarter makes the point. The 2024 election was an anti-American catastrophe we will never fully recover from in my lifetime, and that is truly hard to reckon with.

It has needlessly set us back decades on a social, economic, and diplomatic level. We will never be trusted again.

Because Harris wasn’t elected we are living in a far more dangerous, expensive, and wholly indecent world, and dammit it didn’t have to be this way.

She was a good candidate who was picked under far from perfect circumstances. She was given 100 days to prove her mettle and convince a misogynistic society that she was the best person for the job.

Despite these hurdles this career public servant, who has dedicated her professional life to her country and law and order, ran hard against the convicted felon who only four year earlier had spearheaded the most violent attack on our capitol since 1812. She positively hammered Trump in their one and only debate, and I swear to God, I will never know how anybody could have watched that and still voted for the warped old man who was screaming about people eating dogs and cats.

That America chose the proud bigot over the career public servant makes you wonder if maybe this fading country simply got the leader it deserved.

If nothing else, after 445 long days of this abhorrent regime, it must be glaringly apparent that no matter how flawed the Democratic Party can be, it is immeasurably better for Americans and the world, than the dangerous alternative.

I type that last bit as a lifelong Independent, who cannot fathom voting for a Republican ever again.

It is provably self-destructively insane to vote for Republicans, who time and again do NOTHING for anybody but themselves and mostly the billionaires who own them. They have no ideas that help people, and instead effortlessly hurt them. They are fueled by bigotry, and governed by no-talent white men who are terrified of competing on an equal playing field. Relentlessly devising ways to hold people down is their only known talent.

I’m an old white man, who knows good and damn well what is really going on here …

Look, I don’t know if this will make you feel any better, but you can trust I will not stop repeatedly reminding everybody that the people who voted for Harris were right about everything. We told them what would happen if this hateful, no-talent deviant was somehow elected again, and were ignored.

Well, they can either start listening to us now, or they are complicit in their own demise, and that is just truly pathetic.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.