Awards Radar Endorses Kamala Harris for President

Four years ago, Awards Radar publicly endorsed Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. for President of the United States of America. To be fair, the article was not just a positive endorsement of Biden, but I and the staff were beseeching the American people to remove Donald John Trump from office. With Trump seeking to return to the White House, that urgency is back. This is, without question, an election that the United States has no going back from. The choice made next month will speak volumes about the country so many of us live in, as well as what we’ll accept from our leaders. With the choice being a groundbreaking candidate against a wannabe dictator, the decision is clear.

Awards Radar endorses the incumbent Vice President, Kamala Devi Harris, for President of the United States.

Kamala Harris is a longtime public servant, well-qualified to take office, and represents hope for millions. Not just for women, but for anyone coming from a less privileged background. Does she represent the ideal candidate for all? Of course not. We understand and share the frustration many progressives feel in how her campaign has centered anti-Trump Republicans; individuals who still haven’t honestly reflected on their culpability in our 45th President’s rise to power in their party in the first place. GOP partisans have, as they always do during election campaigns, painted the Democratic nominee this year as a far-left extremist secretly harboring a communist agenda.

But here is the truth:

• Kamala Harris is the most active Vice President in American history, casting a record number of tie-breaking votes in the United States Senate, including for some of the most significant legislation of the Biden Administration.
• In total contradiction to the hysterical MAGA fan fiction about “the border,” irregular migration to the U.S.-Mexico border has declined dramatically over the last ten months, largely thanks to her diplomatic work with Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to productively address the root causes of the problem, rather than inflicting pointlessly cruel government-sponsored violence on vulnerable refugee applicants and desperate migrants.
• She has taken an active role in our continued support of the NATO alliance during a time when its unity is under attack by Russian-funded chaos agents.
• She has committed to not abandoning Ukraine, unlike her opponent, personally rallying support from Germany and Poland in the initial weeks of the invasion.
• She believes in women’s bodily autonomy, and is committed to appointing federal judges who will protect a woman’s right to choose during a time when maternal mortality is skyrocketing in anti-choice states after the dismantling of Roe v Wade.
• Ignoring the pleas of craven reactionary centrist hacks like Jonathan Chait, Kamala Harris has refused to surrender the Democratic Party’s solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community. She officiated same-sex marriages years before Barack Obama publicly supported it, and will continue to protect their basic human rights under her administration.
• She rejects the myth of “Supply Side Economics,” and centers a comprehensive economic policy on closing the wealth gap and reversing our decades-long trend of our economy constantly catering to the whims of the rich.
• Took the politically risky but morally responsible step of publicly criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu‘s excesses during the Israel-Hamas War. While her opponent has been ramping up his genocidal rhetoric towards the Palestinians, Harris has stated: “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire.”
• She selected Tim Walz to be her running mate; a relatable, accomplished public servant with military, legislative, and executive experience in a state consistently ranked among the most prosperous in the nation. His gubernatorial record is proof that progressive policies can move beyond the realm of bougie op-eds and college seminars and be put into practice via policies that tangibly improve the lives of constituents.
• Unlike the last Vice President, Kamala Harris is fully supported by her boss to be his successor. From the incumbent President himself:

Four years ago, I picked Kamala to be my Vice President. I picked her because she is smart and tough. She was a first-rate district attorney out in California, an attorney general, and then U.S. Senator. But most of all, I picked her because she has character and she has integrity. And I must admit, I picked her because she had one endorsement that mattered most to me. My son Beau was the Attorney General of the state of Delaware, and I give you my word, before he headed off to Iraq for a year, he said, ‘Dad, she’s an extraordinary leader. She’s the next generation.’ And she’s been that and more to me. I’m one of the few people in American history who has been Vice President and President, and I know both jobs — what they take. And I can tell you, Kamala Harris has been a great Vice President. She’ll be a great President as well.

On the other hand, Donald Trump represents the opposite of all that. For everything that voters found unacceptable about Trump last time around, expect more of that, just tenfold. We at Awards Radar have been deeply concerned with not only the ways that major news outlets have tried to downplay his dangerous campaign promises and unhinged behavior, but also with the number of Americans who have forgotten just how horrendous his administration was.

To be clear, he was and is an unacceptable presidential candidate for a number of reasons:

• The Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden Administrations combined did not produce the number of convicted criminals out of the White House that Donald Trump did within just one term. One of those convicts being himself!
• He made history as the first President of the postwar era to end his tenure with a net loss of private sector job creation.
• Oversaw the worst mass fatality event on U.S. soil since the American Civil War. COVID-19 killed more Americans than the combined military casualties of the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq Wars within the first year of the outbreak, all while he downplayed the threat and dragged his heels on a coordinated federal response out of a sadistic belief that the disease was mostly killing liberals and minorities and he could benefit politically from those deaths.
• It should not be forgotten that he is a serial sexual predator; credibly accused of assault, misconduct, abuse of power, and literal rape by dozens of women over the last several decades. He employed aggressive, borderline mafia tactics to try to silence them.
• An unprecedented amount of bribery and corruption occurred under his administration, including but not limited to tens of millions of dollars (that we know of) in political campaign contributions siphoned into his private businesses, conducting official meetings at Mar-A-Largo on the taxpayers’ dime, his FCC approving a consumer-screwing T-Mobile/Sprint merger shortly after they just so coincidentally spent $200,000 at Trump hotels, his IRS chief having earned six figures annually from Trump properties, renting out over five hundred of his hotel rooms to Saudi lobbyists, making business deals with foreign countries to build golf courses and condominiums in those countries, and oh right, that time he tried to extort a foreign ally into digging up dirt on a political rival by withholding foreign aid money already approved by Congress. He was impeached for that, remember?
• Spent nearly a quarter of his time as President on a golf course. Not since Calvin Coolidge has there been a Commander-in-Chief who set aside more leisure time in his schedule while in office.
• Publicly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan when he ran for President in 2016, and directly inspired a rise in hate crimes committed by white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Movement, the Groyper Army, and the Oath Keepers, with 2019 experiencing the highest number of violent hate crimes in decades.
• Fact-checkers at the Washington Post documented over 30,000 provable lies told by Donald Trump during the course of his presidency — that’s an average of telling about twenty lies per day. And not the kinds of lies we’ve come to expect from Presidents like “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” but really bizarre lies, like saying the noise from windmills cause cancer and that Ted Cruz‘s father was involved in the JFK assassination.
• The first President since Andrew Jackson to intentionally sabotage the United States Postal Service for partisan gain.
• Only the third President to lose the popular vote twice and the only President ever to be impeached twice.
• The highest staff turnover rate of any modern presidency at 92%, with several of his Cabinet Secretaries later being decried by him as “haters” and “losers” after abruptly resigning or getting fired, including Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Tom Price, David Shulkin, Jeff Sessions, Ryan Zinke, Alex Acosta, Mark Esper, and even Bill-freakin’-Barr. No President has ever been supposedly “betrayed” by his own “best guys.” Several of his former staffers have publicly spoken out against him and are begging America to not put him back in the White House.
• On January 6th, the United States Capitol was violently attacked for the first time since 1814, killing and injuring several people, on the explicit encouragement of President Trump and his personal attorney Rudy “Trial By Combat!” Giuliani after spreading debunked voter fraud lies for two straight months.
• Donald Trump is the first President ever to refuse any public concession whatsoever to the candidate who decisively and inarguably and legally beat him in an election four years ago which wasn’t even all that close, and was the first since Andrew Johnson to not even show the common courtesy of attending his successor’s inauguration. He continues to spread lies about “voter fraud” and “the stolen election” years after Fox News and his own legal team have conceded that those conspiracy theories were all lies.
• His derangement has only gotten worse since leaving office in disgrace. He has promised to turn the military on anyone who votes against him, has expressed a desire to be more like one of history’s greatest monsters, hand equally demented reactionary fascist Elon Musk the keys to rewrite and supervise regulations of the very businesses he owns, appoint cranks like RFK, Jr. to head up scientific agencies, and impose tariffs that will massively increase the cost of basic amenities and likely cause an economic downturn equal to the last one he oversaw.
• He selected J.D. Vance as his running mate; a cynical, predatory venture capital sleaze and protégé of technofascist billionaire Peter Thiel whose sole claim to fame was publishing a condescending pseudo-memoir blaming the working poor of Appalachia for their misfortunes (later turned into a thuddingly mediocre biopic). His record of service to his home state has been abysmal, and the sum total of his political experience is 20 months in the U.S. Senate with no significant legislation or committee accomplishments to his name.
• This is, by no means, a comprehensive list accounting for the full breadth of his incompetence and moral turpitude. We haven’t even mentioned the time the Trump family created fake nonprofit organizations and stole from children’s cancer charities. Yes, that is a thing they actually did.

Shockingly, despite such a dramatic disparity in candidate quality, the race is a nail-biter, making this extra push from of all places an entertainment website, not just needed, but required.

You can’t sit on the sidelines this time, folks.

Awards Radar Approves this Message!