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THE US elections are scheduled to be held on November 5. In these elections, not only will the president and vice-president be elected, but all 435 Congressional seats of the US House of Representatives and 34 of the 100 seats in the United States senate will be selected. That would be the 119th United States Congress.

As of September 6, the national polls show that Kamala Harris is leading in all of them. She is leading by four points in the Outward Intelligence poll, four points in the RMG Research poll, and two points in the Morning Consult poll.

There are only 60 days left before the elections. By withdrawing his candidacy from the presidential election, president Joe Biden has played a ‘President’s Gambit’ and he played it with extreme precision. He opened the platform for vice-president Kamala Harris to step in and challenge the Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Kamala Devi Harris, born on October 20, 1964, is the current 49th vice-president of the United States. She was a US senator from California from 2017 to 2021 and the California attorney general from 2011 to 2017. As the vice-president, she is constitutionally the right person to succeed the president if the president fails to perform their duty or dies. After Joe Biden had supported her candidacy, she said that in her long career as a prosecutor, she has seen ‘Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain… So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.’

She took a swipe at Trump, who has several Federal cases against him and has been found guilty in New York. By this Friday, informally, vice-president Harris has procured enough votes from the Democratic delegates to the National Convention, which will be held in Chicago in August 19–22, to become officially the presidential candidate for the Democratic party. Those who pleaded with Biden, including president Obama, to withdraw his candidacy have supported her.

And Republicans are freaking out. Republican strategist Karl Rove said vice-president Harris would grow the ‘momentum’ after the Democratic national convention to leave Trump behind and forge ahead in the presidential race. This is a very remarkable development. On the other hand, Republican lawmakers, who consider national security to be an essential issue, are moving away from Trump on key issues, including the war in Ukraine, preserving NATO and protecting Taiwan from Chinese aggression. Furthermore, the Washington Post reported today that 24 of 42 of Trump’s former cabinet members have expressed support and the rest are against him.

It is challenging to understand what Trump is saying because his speeches are laced with lies, half-truths, innuendoes and vulgar language. But Trump has plans for when he becomes the president again.

Two videos/documents circulated by Republicans can be taken as their blueprints or plans for the future. They are called Agenda 47 (a series of videos) and Project 2025. The so-called Agenda 47 videos are available on the web site. Prudent journalists have summarised their messages. Here are some of them.

Trump would build 10 state-of-the-art ‘freedom cities’ on federal land and innovation hubs to achieve a ‘quantum leap in the American standard of living’, celebrate ‘an entire year of festivities across the nation’ from Memorial Day 2025 through July 4, 2026, ‘honoring the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence’, designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organisations and impose the death penalty on drug dealers and people traffickers, pardon most of the rioters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as the president, require police to enforce ‘stop-and-frisk’, the practice of detaining and searching civilians for weapons and drugs, crackdown on doctors providing gender-affirming care to minors and ‘pink-haired communists’ pushing critical race theory or ‘inappropriate’ political material in schools, and by an executive order end a longstanding policy of granting citizenship to US-born children with undocumented parents. And, many more like these.

The Heritage Foundation created Project 2025, which included an advisory board of more than 100 conservative groups. It is a 900-page guidebook to overhaul the federal government. It has four pillars and the first one is abortion and social issues, but these issues have been completed by the US Supreme Court, which recently reversed the Row v Wade verdict. The second pillar targets federal agencies, employees, and policies. It says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be eliminated because it discusses environmental decay. Third, it proposes eliminating Homeland Security but creating a new department with 100,000 employees to tackle immigration. It also wants to axe US Agency for International Development staff and grantees that ‘engage in ideological agitation on behalf of the DEI agenda…’ DEI means diversity, equality, and inclusion. Fourth, immigration — recommending finishing the wall along the US-Mexico border and ‘taking a creative and aggressive approach’ to responding to drug cartels at the border. By the time they are implemented, the executive branch of the government will be gone.

These outlandish claims and plans make one wonder if these writings are of sane people. When confronted with this, Trump disputed the initiative and wrote on social media that he knew nothing about Project 2025.

Vice-president Kamala Harris on July 25, when speaking to the American Federation of Teachers, said, ‘Can you believe they put that thing in writing? Nine hundred pages in writing… Project 2025 is a plan to return America to a dark past.’

It would be one of the most critical elections in the US history for the survival of democracy.