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In the aftermath of Donald Trump again tearing down the Blue Wall in 2024 and crushing the hopes of millions of Democrats, mainstream media pundits quickly got busy blaming the electorate. Hispanics are too racist to vote for a black person, Joe Scarborough asserts, while Al Sharpton says that black men are too misogynistic to vote for a woman at all. David Axelrod suggests that Americans, in general, are just too racist and misogynistic to allow a black woman to be president.
There is a lot of that sort of thing going around, but not a lot of introspection yet about one incredibly obvious reason that Trump earned a landslide victory. A big reason that Kamala Harris lost the presidential election in 2024 is because Kamala Harris is the most unlikable and inauthentic presidential candidate in recent memory, and possibly ever.
If Democrats are looking for someone to blame for the circumstances that allowed such a horrible candidate to be propped up to the top of the ticket, they shouldn’t have to think too hard about it. The Democrat establishment and voters seem to have been double-crossed by Joe Biden.
In the world of professional wrestling, this kind of double-cross is known as a “screwjob.” It refers to an incident where a wrestler is disadvantaged, or “screwed,” without his prior knowledge. Professional wrestling is a mostly choreographed spectacle that is meant to gain the approval and entertainment of the largest possible audience, as everyone knows. A wrestler’s livelihood and future depend upon a meticulously crafted and executed narrative. Avid followers of politics should certainly not be strangers to this form of product delivery.
The Montreal Screwjob remains the most infamous incident of its kind in wrestling history. Bret “The Hitman” Hart, who had successfully fashioned a persona as a Canadian hero over many years at World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), had decided upon a very consequential move to World Championship Wrestling (WCW). WWE owner Vince McMahon negotiated with Hart to script a disqualification in his championship match with Shawn Michaels at 1997’s Survivor Series held in Montreal, thereby avoiding Hart’s character losing the belt in his home country and damaging his brand.
But McMahon had no real interest in helping Hart to make a successful transition to a rival company while holding the WWE title. As the match was underway, he surprised everyone by going down to the ring, and had the referee ring the bell while Shawn Michaels was applying Bret Hart’s signature submission move.
Bret Hart was embarrassingly stripped of his belt in front of the world. He was “screwed out of the championship, legitimately, by the promotion of WWE on his way out of the Company,” says Sportkeeda Wrestling, going on to say that “the fans got screwed in the process.”
As mentioned before, politicians are very much like professional wrestlers. They adopt and shape an identity, and carefully craft and execute narratives that are meant to appeal to large swathes of voters. And sometimes, the interests don’t always align among the parties involved in crafting the narrative and putting on the show.
That is clearly what happened with The Kamala Screwjob that began on July 21, 2024, when Joe Biden double-crossed the Democrat establishment leaders, namely Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. And few can deny that Democrat voters very much “got screwed in the process.”
Obama and Co. were, like Democrat voters, obviously very interested in Joe Biden stepping down from the 2024 presidential campaign after his cognitive decline had become too apparent to hide, and to have him replaced by a candidate selected by the Democrat Party’s leadership. Joe Biden, along with his brains trust of Jill and Hunter, didn’t agree with taking the narrative in that direction. But when it became clear that his ouster was imminent, he had no interest in helping Obama and Co. successfully transition to his replacement.
So, Joe shocked the world and the Democrat leadership on a Sunday afternoon with an announcement — not only did he declare that he would be dropping out of the race, but that he was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
We knew immediately that Obama and Co. weren’t aware of the announcement, because they didn’t immediately endorse her. That lack of coordination led me to suspect that it was a double-cross immediately, and I suggested in an article at American Thinker, published the day after the announcement, that Biden had just pulled the pin on a political grenade inside the Democrat tent.
But the evidence only grew in the week following. The momentum created by the prospect of a minority female president (which is the Holy Grail of Democrat intersectionalism) was too much for even the most skilled Democrat politicians to slow down. It took almost a full week before Schumer, Pelosi, and finally Obama would acquiesce and publicly endorse her candidacy.
“None of us had any idea that he would do it on that Sunday,” Nancy Pelosi told the New York Times on August 9. “Then the thought was everybody wanted an open process. Let’s see the talent, let’s see the bench of the Democrats and let them come. And see what they can attract. But when he endorsed her, then it was ‘Are you with me or not?’ And she moved quickly.”
If there was any doubt that Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris was a double-cross by Biden, all doubt should have been removed with this admission from Nancy Pelosi.
Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer would have certainly preferred to have selected a candidate based upon an open process which accounted for perceived voter approval, because they were interested in a Democrat victory in November. And one thing that we can say for sure is that Joe Biden did not endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency because he thought that she was so appealing to voters that she represented the best path to a Democrat victory in November.
Democrat voters had already sniffed her out as an unlikeable phony when she campaigned for the presidency in 2019. Her only accomplishment in that campaign, prior to her abysmal polling that led her to drop out in disgrace, was launching slanderous accusations of racism at Joe Biden — accusations that only ensured bad blood between the Biden family and Kamala Harris.
Biden didn’t endorse her because he personally likes her, either. Among his first acts as president was to diabolically name her the “border czar,” saddling her with heaps of blame for his administration’s incredibly unpopular open border policy. Almost immediately, her approval rating collapsed, and she remained among the most unpopular vice presidents in history up to the point that Joe Biden endorsed her for president.
So, the Biden family despises her, and she was arguably the most unpopular Democrat in the stable of potential presidential candidates. And we are meant to believe that she was endorsed without consulting other Democrat leaders beforehand because the Biden family wanted her to successfully transition to the presidency?
No way. It was obviously a screwjob. And one could reasonably argue that it wasn’t an event, but a process. Biden continued to torpedo her campaign for months, counterprogramming news conferences during her crucial campaign stops, undermining her by refuting her criticism of Ron DeSantis in the wake of Hurricane Milton, wearing Trump campaign gear in swing states, and by calling all of Trump’s supporters “garbage.” How much of that evidence amounts to senility or typical Biden gaffes and how much suggests nefarious campaign sabotage is a topic for debate.
But what we know for certain is that The Kamala Screwjob will be discussed for decades as the most infamous double-cross in the history of American presidential campaign politics. Nothing like it has happened before, and it’s unlikely that anything quite like it will ever happen again. And just as the fans were the ones most “screwed” by The Montreal Screwjob, no one is more screwed by The Kamala Screwjob than the Democrat voters, who never had any say in the outcome, and whose opinion was never even considered in the narrative that played out.
William Sullivan is an author whose work discussing politics, economics, history, and culture has been frequently featured at American Thinker since 2010.