A New York Times op-ed columnist is getting dragged for his suggestion for inspiring national unity and defeating presumptive Republican nominee former President Donald Trump in the 2024 elections.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Thomas L. Friedman, it's as simple as replacing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris with Republican Wyoming Representative and vocal Trump critic Liz Cheney.
Virtually no one would deny the need to pull together as a country, but as you might guess the response to Friedman's piece has basically been "respectfully sir, LOLWAT?" and it hasn't gotten the warmest of receptions.
Friedman uses Israel as a beacon for a way forward. As he explains, the country had been locked in political turmoil for years until last summer, when legislators formed a sort of compromise government led by two alternating Prime Ministers from both sides of the political spectrum in order to unite and ouster Trumpian Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But Israel and the United States couldn't be more apples-to-oranges if they tried. For starters, Israel is a multi-party parliamentary democracy--a system inherently more collaborative and less partisan than ours.
And that's before we address the most obvious problems with this plan: With the exception of the tiny sliver of anti-Trump Republicans out there, the GOP base hates Cheney's guts for not supporting Trump and voting in favor of his second impeachment.
And even if they loved Cheney, the Republican Party hasn't exactly shown interest in adhering to even the most basic of democratic norms. Friedman himself laments this situation in his piece, thus undermining his own entire idea.
“America is facing an existential moment, [political scientist Steven] Levitsky told me, noting that the Republican Party has shown that it isn’t committed any longer to playing by democratic rules, leaving the United States uniquely threatened among Western democracies.”
Sooooo... why exactly would they sign up to vote for this ticket composed of two people they hate, Mr. Friedman? And why would Democrats sign up to simply discard the first female, Black and Asian Vice President in favor of a Republican who has voted against nearly every single piece of Democratic legislation presented during her tenure?
Though Friedman's proposal wasn't without its backers, by and large people were pretty much astonished by what they saw as an absurd idea.
There's no denying that we'll need to unite as a country if we're ever to restore any sense of political normalcy, but as the internet might put it, "this ain't it, chief."
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