The good, bad and ugly of US election campaign

Come November 5, American voters will go to the ballot with two stark choices: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The former is a bombastic yet defiant Republican candidate with reprehensible views against immigrants and Muslims, while the latter, who emerged as a candidate from Democratic Party without a nomination process at the primaries, has no concrete plan on ending Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon.

Apart from exchanging harsh rhetoric throughout the gruelling campaign, which involved an assassination attempt on Trump, who was also found guilty of 34 felony counts, as well as Joe Biden’s unprecedented and unceremonious removal from the presidential race, the entire election season was full of fracas.

Trump called Harris “stupid” numerous times and most lately “dumb as a rock” while the Democratic candidate found the Republican competitor “unstable” and “obsessed with revenge”.

Comparing the decorum of past presidential debates, the choice of words used by both candidates to score political points against each other has taken some veneer off America’s long-cultivated image of being the most-advanced and civilised nation.

As the presidential race ends today, here are some key moments to remember.

Trump found guilty

In May, in the middle of the 2024 campaign, a New York grand jury found Trump guilty of all 34 charges in a case, which is related to a hush money payment to a porn actor to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, making him the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes.

“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial. The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people. They know what happened, and everyone knows what happened here,” Trump told reporters outside the court, which delivered the verdict.

While Democrats have hoped that the guilty sentence would decrease support for Trump, there is growing evidence, which points out that different cases including the hush money verdict “steeled” more backing from US electorate as “Each major court action prompted a wave of contributions to his campaign”, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Failed assassination bid

On July 13, there was another important moment for the campaign, when Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old man, who was reportedly a member of the Republican Party, shot Trump in a Pennsylvania rally, wounding him from his ear and killing another attendee.

Crooks was killed in the shooting scene as his political views and motivation to attack Trump has remained unclear until today as the FBI investigation on the incident continues.

The assassination attempt, which sent shock waves across the US as well as around the world, has increased more support to Trump as the former president with a bloody face raised his hand to call his backers to continue to “fight” for his cause.

“The most incredible thing was that I happened to not only turn [my head] but to turn at the exact right time and in just the right amount," he reflected on the assassination attempt two days later during an interview. "I’m supposed to be dead, I’m not supposed to be here,” he added.

The growing popularity of Trump in the wake of the unsuccessful assassination forced the Democrat Party to rethink the chances of Biden, its presidential candidate at the time, against the Republican.

Biden throws in the towel

Eleven days after the shooting and a week after the Republican convention, which officially nominated Trump as the party’s candidate, Biden, the oldest presidential candidate ever in US history, announced to leave the race under growing pressure from leading Democrats.

Biden faced heavy criticism after his poor televised debate against Trump on June 28, during which he faltered several times, highlighting a crucial moment in the 2024 campaign. Harris, the vice-president, quickly emerged as the consensus candidate in Democratic Party.

While the party’s August convention officially endorsed her as the Democratic presidential candidate, many thought that Harris’s nomination has marked a case of democratic deficit in the very party, which constantly portrays Trump as a dictator aiming to dismantle the US democratic system.

Daniel Klinghard, professor of political science at the College of the Holy Cross, views that this event marks “a culmination of the elite-oriented trends that have shaped the nominating process since 1984, in which party elites have played an increasingly large role in shaping the presidential nomination,” making the Democratic party ironically “less democratic”.

But overall, many thought that Harris is definitely a better choice than Biden as the new candidate initially received much enthusiasm from both party supporters and the general US electorate.

Harris-Trump debate

Another crucial moment in the 2024 campaign was the debate between the two candidates, which took place on September 10 in Pennsylvania, a swing state, allowing Americans more insight on their differences and possible leaderships.

While there was no clear winner in the televised event unlike the previous Biden-Trump debate, in which Biden clearly failed in the face of Trump’s assertiveness and endless attacks.

During the debate, Trump repeated a debunked claim that Haitian migrants, who arrive in the US, do things like “eating the dogs…They’re eating the pets of the people that live there and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

There was no other debate after the September confrontation while Harris' campaign called for another one on October 23. “The problem with another debate is that it’s just too late, voting has already started,” Trump said, during a rally in late September.

Garbage truck

Most lately, the contested campaign saw another controversy caused apparently by Biden, who called Trump voters “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters”, responding to a comment from a Republican guest at the former president’s rally, who described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”.

On Thursday, a happy Trump, who dressed like a sanitation worker, climbed into a garbage truck, to show he represents all Americans - be they blue collar or white collar - asking his audience “How do you like my garbage truck?” adding that “This is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.”

He also said that “250 million Americans are not garbage,” referring to his vote tally in the previous election. Biden later said that he did not mean Trump voters but his words referred to specifically “Trump's supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally”.