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It is the October Surprise everyone was waiting for without knowing what it would be (do not settle back comfortably yet – there is still time for many others):
The respected and influential ZeroHedge.com https://www.zerohedge.com/ financial and economic analysis web platform commented on October 23: “In a huge and surprise development, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has specified and verbalized what could be a first concrete step toward [a] ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.” He told journalists in Kiev this week that both sides should mutually agree on halting all aerial attacks on energy targets and cargo ships, and that this could pave the way for negotiations to end the war.
The comments were first reported by Financial Times [in London] on Tuesday (October 22), which quoted the Monday (October 21) remarks as follows: “When it comes to energy and freedom of navigation, getting a result on these points would be a signal that Russia may be ready to end the war.”
ZeroHedge.com correctly and astutely observes: “This is a significant turn, given that up until this week Zelensky had always rejected the very idea of talks with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, saying he would not negotiate with Moscow so long as the Russian strongman remains in power. That thinking appears to have changed, likely a reflection of the increasing desperation Ukraine’s armed forces are feeling.” But Zelensky’s change of direction, as the report rightly observes, reflects something else as well: Zelensky believes former US President Donald Trump, in his third consecutive national US election, is going to regain the presidency defeating know-nothing, obviously hapless Democratic contender Vice President Kamala Harris. For as I predicted in these columns on July 28, quoting Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler 124 years ago, “You cannot beat something with nothing.”
Within the previous few days, no less than 22 states had flipped to Trump.
Zelensky is not just panicking in isolation, though such behavior would be all too typical for him. One of the most consistent, accurate and respected analysts of US political trends, Nate Silver, founder and head of the FiveThirtyEight project, warned this week (October 24 at the time of writing) that within the previous few days, no less than 22 states had flipped to Trump in his assessments based on analysis of the multiplicity of polls carried out in them. If that assessment should prove accurate – and Silver usually is – Trump will win by a wider margin in the US Electoral College on November 5 than he did in 2016.
Silver, quite properly, does not claim his assessment is a written-in-stone unavoidable prophecy. He also stresses that the US public appears to remain almost precisely divided. He puts the Trump-Harris split in support at 50-50. You might as well toss a coin to decide the outcome. But he then adds, based on his long and successful career monitoring such trends, that his “gut instinct” is that Trump is going to win.
One can certainly write endless pieces quoting endless supposedly authoritative polls and commentators predicting confidently that Harris will still win by a landslide. One can also cherry pick endless conservative commentators who assure the same outcome for Trump. But a number of key indicators suggest Nate Silver is correct again.
Trump is a vastly superior personal campaigner than Harris. He is passionate.
First, an increasing number of commentators and news platforms who hate Trump like poison and who have always been shamelessly partisan to Harris and the Democrats are now voicing the same concerns.
Second, close analysis of both national and state by state polls, especially in the 10 or 12 crucial large population “battleground states,” have shown Trump pulling up with Harris at last or even starting to outstrip her.
Third, Trump is quite simply a vastly superior personal campaigner than Harris. He is passionate. For all his exaggerations, he is vastly more factual than Harris. He takes the threat of nuclear war with Russia or over the Middle East seriously. And he knows vastly more about the economy.
Harris by contrast is simply incoherent. She has already become a national joke. Her convoluted answers on prime-time television to even the most obsequious, toothless, defanged and castrated of media interviewers (and she will not talk to any other kind) have now been named “word salads” because they are jumbles of incomprehensible incoherence.
Even almost 82-year-old and unquestionably senile (he appears to be incontinent and requiring adult diaper changes too) President Joe Biden makes more sense. Whenever Harris is asked any question about the economy – on soaring gasoline and energy prices, out of control housing and rent costs, rising inflation and unemployment – she always gives the same risible and ludicrous stock answer automatically with her usual fixed, fake smile on her face, starting with: “I come from a middle-class family.” That has already become another national joke.
In other words, Harris has fizzled: she has become the nonentity James Cox in 1920, Great Depression Gloom and Doom Incumbent President Herbert Hoover in 1932, absurd, pompous little Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 and worst of all, whining little Jimmy Carter in 1980. No one takes her seriously anymore.
The US economy have to stay apparently stable and the wider world safe for Harris to ride to victory on November 5. Neither of these things have happened.
I predicted this likely development in these columns back in August when Harris enjoyed her dream coronation at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Back then I acknowledged she was coasting to victory. But I added the crucial caveat that the US economy had to stay apparently stable and the wider world safe for her to ride to victory on November 5. Neither of these things have happened, and Harris’s woeful ignorance, inexperience and stupidity is being increasingly displayed so obviously that even the liberal half of the American people cannot continue to deny and ignore it.
Therefore, when Zelensky in Kiev on October 21 started to make his extraordinary U-turn towards a peaceful settlement with Russia after throwing away 600,000 lives of the Ukrainian people just for the applause of whimpering former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her friends, he was responding to serious and real political trends emerging across the entire North American continent.
If a free, open and fair election is held in the United States on November 5, right now Donald Trump looks far more likely to win it.
Of course, many other outcomes are also possible.
