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Nov. 18, 2024 Editor, The News-Gazette: I think Mike Lowry’s recent column has it backwards in suggesting that the outcome of the 2024 American presidential election involved people winning over money.
Yes, Harris’s official campaign appears to have raised more than Trump’s official campaign, but there were also a host of Trumpsupporting super PACs, and the likes of Mellon, Musk, Uihlein and Adelson each provided hundreds of millions of dollars toward Trump winning. What I find highly encouraging is all of the smaller-dollar donors who gave to the Harris campaign, counteracting at least some of the influence of these multi-billionaires supporting Trump.
That influence largely consisted of social media ads. With the way that I used my social media, I was able to see the full onslaught of what these ads were doing – manipulation or even explicit lies about transgender individuals, about people fleeing violence to migrate into our country, and about inflation.
Inflation was experienced across the world in 2022, because of supply chain disruptions, ultimately as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic. Under the Biden administration, though, inflation was brought down faster than it was in our peer countries while still keeping unemployment low and the stock market kept hitting record levels. That is the macroeconomic equivalent of splitting the atom. However, the barrage of Trumpsupporting social media spending left many people bizarrely thinking the opposite about what the Biden administration was able to do.
We all know about our president- elect – refusing to concede, encouraging an armed attack on our capital, felonies, sexual assault, praising authoritarians, valuing loyalty above all else. I do hope pro-Trump commentators are right that our constitutional representative democracy will be fully preserved, but I think it is ridiculous to suggest that there is zero reason for concern with having such an individual as our head of state. DAVID TOOMEY Lexington
