The louche punditocracy of the corporate media made a huge deal about "what we know" when President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and was replaced with Vice President Kamala Harris. Story after story was all about how voters didn't "know" Harris and how that would impact her election chances. And it never really stopped. Hell, at the beginning of this month, Fox "news" was still blaring, "Some Biden 2020 voters say they don't know enough about Kamala Harris," with an article that included such insightful words from supposedly undecided voters like "She has been the vice president for the past four years and not really implemented anything," which means they've probably only been watching Fox "news."
But there's a fuck of a lot we don't know about Donald Trump and it's some pretty basic, life-or-death shit. I mean, think about what we do know. It's a fact that he's a rapist. It's a fact that he's a 34 times convicted felon. It's a fact that he stole money from a charity. It's a fact that he defrauded people with Trump University. It's a fact that he is currently out of jail on bail. All these are Things We Know.
In the category of Things We Don't Know? You can start with his health. We got a detailed look at Harris's current fitness for the job of president, including that she is up-to-date on her colonoscopies and mammograms. And when you see her on the campaign trail, she is active, ebullient, and engaged, while in interviews, she answers the questions clearly. You might not like the answers, but they are always in the ball park of what was asked.
Donald Trump's health is, to put it politely, fucking alarming. He's sweaty and exhausted, and his speech is slurred and listless. He can't respond directly to a question, getting so caught up in his repeated lies and bullshit that he leaps from subject to subject like Benjy Compson in the first part of The Sound and the Fury...Sorry, sometimes the literary scholar in me rears its ugly head...how about: "jumping around like a jackrabbit on meth that's been swatted in the nuts"? He's obviously declined mentally, and he was in pretty sorry shape back in 2015, and he's obviously reaching some kind of expiration date on many of the things a body existing on Big Macs and Diet Cokes and no exercise can do.
But we don't know a goddamn thing about his health beyond what the disgraced and drunk Ronny Jackson said and two paragraphs from some doctor that offered no details at all. And that goes for the assassination attempt, too. We never heard from the medical personnel who treated him in Pennsylvania, only a report from Jackson who visited Trump in New Jersey after he was released. As PBS's Newshour commented, "After a would-be assassin shot and gravely wounded President Ronald Reagan in 1981, the Washington, D.C., hospital where he was treated gave regular, detailed public updates about his condition and treatment."
I'm not saying there's any conspiracy here except one of silence. And maybe voters need to know whether or not they're really voting for JD Vance presidency.
Then there's Trump's criminal trials. It goes without saying that Attorney General Merrick Garland fucked up by not immediately pursuing investigations and charges against Trump in 2021. But the wanton fuckery of Trump's lawyers and his self-appointed lackey judges has prevented some really important information from reaching voters: Is he guilty? We don't know if he's guilty, according to a jury, of trying to overthrow the government and steal the election. We don't know if he's guilty, according to a jury, of stealing government secrets (or, you know, mishandling documents). We don't know if he's guilty, according to a jury, of trying to overturn the vote in Georgia (or, you know, get others to do it).
We know he's a criminal, but we don't know the extent of his criminality. And, yeah, I know, I know, I fucking know, that most people with eyes who aren't fully up the ass of the MAGA monster or have a financial interest in Trump being free know for sure that Trump is goddamned traitor who should have been arrested the second Joe Biden was sworn in. On top of the trials, he's supposed to be sentenced on November 26 for his 34 convictions in the New York hush money laundering. We don't know what that's going to be.
Trump claims that it would be "election interference" for the public to know whether or not one of the two candidates is guilty of dozens of crimes directly related to his fitness for office. But, then again, Trump thinks that if a TV network edits an interview in a way he doesn't like, it's election interference. In her decision allowing the release of an appendix of evidence in the January 6 case, Judge Tanya Chutkan smacked down that bullshit: "If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute — or appear to be — election interference. The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests." Yeah, that's the correct framing: more information is better than ignorance. Of course, more information is like salt to the slugs of the right.
And more: He's never released his tax returns. We really don't know the extent of Trump's financial entanglement with other nations. We honestly don't have a single detailed plan from him, beyond the Republican platform and Project 2025, which barely mentions tariffs at all, the apparent alpha and omega of his economic plan.
This shit matters. All of it. But, instead, we hear that voters "know" Trump but not Harris, who has been very clear about what she wants to do and has now done a fuckton of interviews while Trump is practically heading into hibernation because his brain is two cups short of a full pack of pudding.
Besides, voters should fucking know what Trump did in his first term, but they've apparently forgotten that it was a clusterfuck of terrible policies and attempts to grab the golden ring of fascism, but just missing. We hear very little about all that, too. Our lack of knowledge about some pretty basic shit involving Trump is just a huge, bright warning sign before we go off the election cliff.