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Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are set to face off in a presidential debate. The polls have the candidates neck and neck. But there's one thing Kamala Harris can do that would all but guarantee her a victory over Trump—not just in the debate but in the election: Harris must tell the truth.
I don't mean any specific truth, but rather, the larger truth about politics, namely, that it requires humility, the ability to doubt oneself, and a commitment to listen to skeptics. If Harris is able to articulate her readiness to be an honest, accountable politician, this more than any specific policy will tip the election in her favor. Because it is in embracing humility that she will provide the starkest contrast with Trump.
Imagine Vice President Harris taking the debate stage and saying something like this:
Donald Trump wants you to believe that the President of the United States is a monarch, a dictator, the decider in chief of our way of life. He will make promises about all the things he can and will do. But the President is not a monarch or a dictator. The President is instead a servant and champion of a diverse and divided government of checks and balances bound together by the Constitution and the nonviolent dynamism of healthy debate, dissent, and dialectic collaboration.
Imagine if Vice President went on like this:
I am supposed to pretend that I have all the answers, know all the policies, and can solve all the major problems of our nation. I am supposed to prepare a prepackaged platform of these ideas to win your votes. Yet ours is a system of the people, not the presidency. The answers to our complex problems as a nation are to be found within the restored trust of our institutions. It is my commitment, therefore, to restore faith and trust in American pluralism, debate, dissent, and diversity of ideas.
Instead of tearing down our trust in this messy and complex genius of representative democracy, I will be the Champion-in-Chief of our collective capacity to resolve our problems together.
Imagine if Harris went on to say:
The real answers exist within the still functioning genius of our divided government, with you, your needs, your ideas, your interests. I will help us remember this by turning down the vitriol, nastiness, and attacks, blending my cabinet with Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. I will model the tough discipline of listening to the other side for the sake of showing how to reach consensus when it is very hard to do so.
Imagine if she concluded as follows:
Maybe this is the great gift that Donald Trump has given us: By pushing our entire system so far to the brink of itself, we have come to better appreciate just how precious that system of government is. This is my promise: If our system requires tolerance to handle differences, then the President above all others must be able to model this temperament, belief, and practice.
The driving aim of my presidency will be to rally the trust of you, the people.
This is how Kamala Harris wins, not just the debate, but the presidency.
Of course, Harris will not say anything like this. She will instead try to trump Trump at Trumping: She will look for the zinger, getting under his skin, angling the right policy bent to get the right voter support.
And Trump, of course, will keep provoking with his infamous politics of attack and insult, leaving the honest, humble, tempered office of the presidency buried beneath our collective lust for entertainment and public spectacle.
We are fated to live not in the alternate reality I laid out but in our reality—until enough of us say enough.
Misha Thomas is an education and mental health consultant.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
