I watched it. All three hours of Joe Rogan interviewing Donald Trump (admittedly tuning out a bit when they nerded out over Mixed Martial Arts). And you know what I saw? It was something amazing, although it would have seemed rather ordinary a few short years ago.

I watched two actual human beings, with all their warts and flaws, exchange ideas sincerely. Each of them showed intellectual curiosity about the world. Each had some silly opinions. Neither was a world-historical genius or a visionary artist. This wasn’t like watching a dialogue between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, much less a debate between saints like Augustine and John of the Cross.

But it was human. It made me nostalgic. It brought back memories of life before 2016, when the spiritual warfare that’s always going on this side of the grave wasn’t so blatant and in your face. When Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator in his garish modern building with his former model third wife, I certainly didn’t suspect that this represented a kind of opening of the Seventh Seal, or a blast of the trump of doom (yes, pun intended). I wouldn’t have pegged this secular, moderate wheeler-dealer from Queens as the instrument God would use to rip the masks off things.

But then I wouldn’t have reckoned on Cyrus or Constantine, either. Ours is a God of surprises.

Watching Rogan interview Trump, I kept thinking, Would this even be possible to do with Kamala Harris? And the answer of course is no, which is why she dodged Rogan, using every possible excuse.

A Magic 8 Ball of Platitudes

It’s not just that Harris possesses a barely-average intelligence, the flabby product of centuries of privilege. (Her parents were comfortable academics, descended from Jamaican slaveowners on one side and elite, Dalit-kicking Brahmins on the other.) Nor that she coasted through undemanding schools, lubricated by White Guilt through DEI loopholes so that she never had to learn how to work hard or think independently. I like to joke that Harris slept her way to the middle, then failed her way to the top — coming dead last in the Democratic primaries, “earning” the vice presidential slot thanks to her skin pigment and sexual favors.

But it’s worse — much worse — than that. As you’ll know if you’ve watched any of the rare occasions when her Deep State handlers (who are really and anonymously running the country) let her interact with humans, Harris is barely present. The lights keep flickering on, but nobody’s home.

Remember her interview on Fox with Bret Baier? He’s hardly the old Mike Wallace, but he did feel obligated to ask her human questions and expect some kind of answer that used human language and reflected rational thought. (Most reporters speak to Harris as if she were a very dull-witted child or a very clever poodle.)

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She gave Baier nothing. She’s actually less cogent than the spectacularly senile Joe Biden — who at least had to lie, cheat, and steal his way to the right hand of Barack Obama. We see in Biden the shell of a once-mediocre man. But Harris seems less convincingly human than ChatGPT — which reliably spits out answers vastly more cogent and responsive than hers are.

Whenever someone asks Harris a question and she doesn’t have access to a teleprompter, it’s as if the questioner were playing with a Magic 8-Ball toy. You know those gimmicks from the 1970s you used to shake? They had a window, and when you asked a question and shook it, inside a little 20-sided ball would come up with a cryptic, suggestive answer, like “Reply Hazy, Try Again” or “Better Not Tell You Now.”

But the plastic answer ball inside Harris’s head is engraved with different answers, divided into several categories:

• Fragments of classic American political rhetoric, stripped of their meaning. Hence she’ll spit out a soundbite gesturing at “Justice” or “Equity” or “Joy.” (To which the white reporters who went to decent schools on their own merits will nod with unfeigned excitement, apparently impressed that Harris can speak at all.)
• Bland, New Age affirmations that seem to be pirated from “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey.” The little ball spinning inside Harris’s murky head will riff on those phrases about “the significance of the passage of time” or “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”
• Ominous, slanderous warnings that anyone who opposes her is infected with hate, intent on dictatorship, and a threat to everything holy — such as abortion on demand right up through birth.

Kamala Harris Might Actually Be as Bad as … Dubya

The Democrats are actually counting on this person to win this upcoming election, then serve as their front woman, as they go right on doing exactly what they’ve been doing since 2020: consulting her in the process no more than they ever consulted the Former Joe Biden.

Our elites wouldn’t have tried a scam like this before 2016. Back then they nominated candidates with actual track records of achievement (even if what they’d accomplished was foolish and futile). They sought out military veterans to run for office, albeit shabby ones like John Kerry.

Bill Clinton was a governor multiple times and had a genuine sociopathic charm — of the kind you see in some Flannery O’Connor stories, like the one where the traveling Bible salesman gets the one-legged village atheist to sleep with him in the barn, then steals her wooden leg. Barack Obama was a phony and a far-left flim-flam artist, but he at least could speak in cogent sentences that contained some rational content.

But Trump’s trip down that escalator changed everything. Perhaps that’s because he’s more authentically human than most of the Republicans who came before him, such as the nattering, privileged dilettante George W. Bush. Trump isn’t a soulless rhetoric generator like Mitt Romney, or a sneering elitist like Nikki Haley. He’s someone who is genuinely and sincerely attached to the country and the city where he grew up. He loves Big Macs, pretty women, and gold-plated toilets. He hears happy-clappy phrases like the “New World Order” and “Building Back Better” and wrinkles his nose, sniffing out the manure, then says: “Nah, I’m not gonna eat that.”

I find it both striking and weirdly providential that God is apparently moving to save us from inhuman schemes for mass impoverishment and mass sterility, not with a blazing hero or fulminating prophet, but a straightforward reminder of what human beings, when they’re being real, really are: A guy in a red tie, driving a garbage truck with a big grin on his face.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.