Welcome back in for this special election serving of Al’s Afternoon Tea. 

Yesterday we started working our way through our list of the 10 key moments from the 2024 presidential campaign season. Part 1 detailed:

• Former President Donald Trump’s visit to East Palestine, Ohio, in February;
• The lawfare against Trump, which backfired and turned the billionaire former president into a folk hero; and
• The lawfare against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. which pushed him out of the Democratic Party and onto Team Trump.

Here are the next few installments on our countdown.

7. Going with the Big Guy Fails Big-Time

The Democrats are in the hole they are in because the party decided not to pressure Joe Biden not to run for reelection back in 2023, and then snuffed out any efforts from rising hopefuls seeking to face him in a primary. But even as desperately as the party, the media, and the White House tried to hide it, it was crystal-clear that Biden was mentally incapacitated. Heck, Special Counsel Robert Hur even put that in writing and testified under oath to Congress about it.

In public, Biden would boast about talking to dead foreign leaders, shake the hands of invisible people, turn every speech into a horror show of stumbles, mumbles, and incoherencies — punctuated by inappropriate shouts and creepy whispers thrown in for good measure. He’d get lost on stage, read the stage directions included on his teleprompter, and had cue cards instructing him how to do the simplest things.

Sending the man out in public, let alone retaining office, was an act of elder abuse.

“No, no, he’s fine,” Kamala Harris insisted. Heck, she insisted again on NBC News only last Tuesday night that she never saw any problems. When Biden froze several times in late spring as if his power cord had been disconnected, the administration and its allies accused Republicans of deceptively editing the video footage showing it.

6. The Disastrous Debate and the Dumping of the President

Then came June 27 — the CNN presidential debate between Joe Biden and Father Time. Sure, Trump also was on stage, but he had not even said a word before it became clear that Biden was done. He was confused, incoherent, and raspy, with a look on his face you generally see from people in hospice care, not the Oval Office. 

It was 90 minutes of torture so intense that Amnesty International called for an investigation of CNN.

BIDEN: "He went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by an immigrant. But here's the deal, a lot of young women are being raped by their inlaws. By their spouses. By their brothers and sisters. It's just ridiculous."

What is Joe Biden trying to say? pic.twitter.com/3eklYUglr8

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) June 28, 2024

Over the following three weeks, Biden’s poll numbers plummeted, donors stopped giving money to the Democrats, efforts to prove his debate performance had been only a fluke failed miserably, and the pressure on Biden to step aside grew enormously. But the Big Guy insisted he was in it for the duration, and was the best candidate the Democrats had.

Until the morning of July 21, surrogates continued to brush off talk of Biden dropping out of the race. They didn’t know that Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker leader who was now leading a party hit squad, had “convinced” Biden the Democrats would be better off if he gave up the presidential nomination. And by “convinced,” we mean she suggested the Twenty-Fifth Amendment would be used against him if he didn’t drop out voluntarily. The old guy gave in, and by that afternoon, his 14 million primary votes had been tossed in the garbage.

Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Biden himself had hoped there would be some sort of mini-primary to keep some semblance of democracy in the process of naming his successor. They already knew Kamala Harris to be a wretched campaigner.

However, before any others potential nominees could react, Harris had called around to scoop up enough Democratic delegates to make any challenge futile.

And so it was that Harris, without getting a single primary vote in 2020 or 2024, became the Democratic presidential nominee — running on a platform to “save democracy” and do so with “joy.”

All because the DNC had years earlier decided to protect Joe Biden from the democratic process.

5. The V.P. Choices: One Chose Poorly

Who you choose as your running mate says a lot about who a presidential candidate is and how he or she intends to govern. It also says a lot about the quality of people with whom he or she will staff the next administration.

Donald Trump selected freshman Senator J.D. Vance from Ohio — a Marine veteran turned Yale-educated lawyer turned bestselling author turned venture capitalist. About the worst thing anyone could say about him was that he has a beard.

That’s not quite true. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had scampered around cable news shows labeling Vance as “weird.” But that turned out to be like O.J. Simpson accusing someone else of being careless with a knife.

Yet, that’s who Kamala Harris chose in her first major personnel decision: Tim Walz. She passed over the popular governor of the swing state of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, for the unpopular governor of blue Minnesota. The conventional wisdom is that Harris was too scared that picking the Israel-supporting Jewish Shapiro would tick off the Arab Americans and leftist antisemitic mobs who are upset over Israel’s war against Hamas. She caved under pressure. (As it happens, Arab Americans are rejecting her to a surprising degree anyway.)

How has that turned out? Thus far, Walz has been a disaster, a burden around Harris’s neck. He was immediately exposed as a serial fabricator of facts: He lied about serving in a combat zone, lied about his drunk driving arrest, lied about his travels to China’s Tianannmen Square, and lied about his wife’s fertility treatments. Even though he’s a millionaire, Walz just recently suggested that his mom is living from Social Security check to Social Security check. When challenged on those lies, he has shrugged it off as being a “knucklehead.”

Oh, and according to his own words and state policies, he is “friends with school shooters,” loves communism more than democracy, and stocks boys’ public school restrooms with tampons.

Plus, for a guy who was supposed to court the male vote in the Midwest, he’s turning out to be more like Dylan Mulvaney than Marshall Dillon. Or even Matt Dillon.

As for Vance? He’s been taking a blowtorch to reporters and TV talking heads who have tried attacking him or Trump. He’s been delivering speeches and taking questions from all comers with brilliance, wit, and eloquence — all while sharing his compelling life story. He’s daily taking a sledgehammer to the Democrats’ Blue Wall in the Midwest.

Walz has become Harris’s albatross. Vance has become Trump’s heir apparent.  

4. The Second Presidential Debate: Canned Kamala and Moderators Fail to Take Out Trump

The Trump-Harris presidential debate provided the latter with the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with the champ. To prove she deserves to be in the ring, to show she has what it takes to be president.

While she did not flop the way Joe Biden did, Harris also offered no real answers to any of the questions, instead serving up her usual dose of word salads and platitudes, including a line that has become a source of much mockery: “I was raised in a middle-class family.” Pro tip: When your most memorable line becomes a punch line, it means you lost the debate.

Harris spent the night launching shrill, nasty, and often outright false attacks on Trump. What’s our campaign rule again? Say it with me: If Trump is the nicest guy on stage, he wins. It may be petty of us to point this out, but Harris also had a strange, staged, practiced way of resting her chin in her hand whenever Trump spoke. That is, when she wasn’t looking frightened.

Trump, however, delivered a line that will go down in the annals of presidential debates. Railing about the dangers of Harris’s open border, he referenced the crisis the citizens of Springfield, Ohio have faced after a mass influx of Haitian migrants: “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!” (That line launched its own litany of memes and videos, including this one):

As epic as that is, the debate’s most lasting impact has been exposing just how far the media will go to protect Kamala Harris. Donald Trump was not just debating her. That would have been easy. Rather, he had to take on ABC News’s “moderators,” particularly David Muir. Every single question was designed to help Harris and hurt Trump. Trump was repeatedly fact-checked — falsely, as it turns out in the case of crime going up under the Biden-Harris administration — while Harris was not fact-checked a single time.

More than their bias, though the repulsive performance of the moderators was a clear indication that Kamala Harris can’t stand on her own. From Willie Brown to Joe Biden to David Muir to now Barack Obama and Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, she has shown a willingness to let men do her heavy lifting while she sits back and watches.

Which leads to the final installment of our series.

Coming Up in Part 3

Harris hides from the media for more than a month — only to repeatedly shoot herself in the foot after emerging.

Plus, the single most potent moment of the 2024 presidential campaign season.

Al Perrotta is The Stream’s Washington bureau chief, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.