Opinion | Dave Barry's 2024 year in review

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

78% : The convention gives Harris an immediate boost in the polls, and suddenly Trump faces a serious challenge, to which he responds, during a two-hour speech to a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: "I say that I'm much better looking than her.
66% : In presidential election news, Trump makes a campaign appearance at a Pennsylvania McDonald's, during which he wears an apron and serves some people at the drive-through window.
63% : New York remains in the news with the onset of the single most exciting thing ever to happen to CNN: yet another trial of Trump.
59% : True trivia fact: Trump finished 62nd in that celebrity tournament.
59% : "Somehow Trump survives all this journalism.
58% : The convictions, like all the other legal actions against Trump, are a massive boost for his candidacy, energizing his supporters and generating tens of millions of dollars in donations, an outcome that could have been predicted by anybody with a rudimentary understanding of Trump's appeal, although it apparently did not occur to the geniuses behind this particular legal strategy.
57% : It's so bad that, by comparison, Trump seems, at times, to be almost lucid.
56% : And so, thanks to our political system under which the nominees for the most powerful office in the world are chosen by approximately 73 people in approximately four rural states while the vast majority of Americans are still taking down their Christmas decorations again find ourselves facing a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
56% : In this one, he's charged with falsifying business records as part of a scheme to guarantee that every single human being on the planet, including members of primitive tribes in the Amazon jungle, would be aware that Trump had a one-night stand with aldult-film star Stormy Daniels.
55% : For example: Speaking to a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Trump informs the crowd that their beloved hometown hero, Arnold Palmer, had an unusually large putter.
54% : Stormy Daniels tells a New York jury in explicit detail about her encounter with Trump during a 2006 celebrity golf tournament, testifying that when she came out of the bathroom in Trump's hotel suite, he was waiting for her wearing only a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and before she could stop him he proceeded -- without wearing a condom -- to falsify business records.
54% : Helping Trump with the transition is his new best billionaire friend Elon Musk, the genius tech visionary who's going to make the federal government efficient by implementing "outside the box" measures such as:Having veterinarians install locator chips in all federal employees.
53% : On weekends, when he's not in court, Trump continues to campaign for president.
53% : In roughly the same amount of time it takes to air a Geico commercial, the networks determine that Trump has decisively won the election, including all of the so-called battleground states and four Canadian provinces.
53% : For his part, Trump has no doubt whatsoever that the American people have given him a mandate to deport anywhere up to 60 percent of the U.S. population and -- in his words "turn this great nation around by appointing wildly unqualified individuals to the Cabinet.
50% : On election night, the TV networks are teeming with political commentators prepared to analyze and dissect and crunch the numbers far into the night as the nation settles in for the long, grueling process of determining the winner -- a process that everyone agrees could go on for days, possibly even weeks, because of the extreme razor-thin closeness of the ...Never mind.
49% : As the month draws to a close, Trump is found guilty on all 34 felony counts of whatever it is that he was charged with.
48% : Trump is shot in the ear by a man who is somehow able to climb -- unimpeded, with a rifle -- onto the roof of a building that not only is within range of the speaker's platform, but also has three police snipers stationed inside it.
46% : Trump is wanted on criminal charges in something like 23 states and, if elected, could become the first president to govern from a secret hideout.
46% : In environmental news, 70,000 world leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, aides, activists, consultants, celebrities, media people, caterers, chauffeurs, bodyguards, grifters, masseurs, masseuses and private-jet pilots gather for COP29, the massive conference held every year by the United Nations to solve the pesky problem of global climate change.
44% : He continues to crisscross the nation promising tax breaks for pretty much every category of U.S. resident including domestic animals, and giving increasingly improvisational speeches during which every thought fragment that seeps into his brain spurts instantly from his mouth without any kind of review.
42% : A week after the debate, police capture a would-be assassin who was spotted with a rifle on a golf course where Trump was playing.
40% : The judge fines Trump nearly half a billion dollars and bans him for the next three years from riding in any motorcade more than six cars long.
35% : Just when it appears that the presidential race cannot get any more insane, Trump goes to Butler, Pennsylvania, to hold a campaign rally, for which the security has apparently been outsourced to Boeing.
35% : Three weeks later Kennedy suspends his campaign and urges his followers to vote for Trump, assuming they are able to chew through their restraints.
33% : One theory is that it was not a great idea for Democrats to insist that Biden was fine until it was embarrassingly obvious that he was not, then replace him, via a secret process, with a candidate who was not great at talking and did not run in a single primary and who previously advocated positions that many Americans were not crazy about, which is why they voted, sometimes reluctantly, for Trump.
31% : Trump gets a break when an appeals court lowers the amount to $175 million, which Trump says he definitely has, although he left it in his other pants.
31% : In a possibly related development, Trump announces that he is selling -- we are not making this up -- "God Bless the USA" Bibles for $59.99 a pop.
31% : So there's a lot on the line when Biden and Trump square off in a much-anticipated prime-time debate, which was proposed by the Biden campaign, apparently on the advice of Boeing.
30% : Meanwhile, Trump is acting as though he's already the president: meeting with foreign leaders, signing treaties, vetoing legislation, authorizing drone strikes and ordering the beheading of "Peach" and "Blossom," the two turkeys Biden pardoned for Thanksgiving.
25% : The wording of the pardon document is quite broad, covering "all offenses committed between 2014 and 2024, including any currently unsolved bank robberies, not that we are suggesting anything."The pardon outrages many Republicans who would be fine with it if Trump did it, while it's fine with many Democrats who would be outraged if Trump did it.
21% : Gaetz is soon forced to withdraw his name from consideration after Trump is informed that the U.S. Senate, for all its shortcomings, is not completely insane.
20% : Newsweek runs a story headlined "Was Donald Trump's McDonald's Shift 'Staged?'" The New York Times runs at least six -- that's right, six -- stories about it, including one asserting that, among other infractions, Trump "shoveled a scoopful of fries the wrong way" and "committed what appeared to be a number of health code violations.
18% : Meanwhile, Trump, who is appearing in court more often than Perry Mason, is found guilty by a New York civil judge on charges of financial fraud, aiding and abetting, aggravated contempt, disorderly obstruction, second-degree vagrancy and loitering with intent to conspire.
17% : Another controversial Trump nomination, this one for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is Robert F. "Roadkill" Kennedy Jr., who used to think Trump was basically Hitler but now thinks he's great.
16% : On the Democratic side, the Harris campaign, which has spent more than $1 billion but is still struggling to clearly define the candidate's vision for the presidency, settles on an upbeat closing message: "Whoever she is, she's not Donald Trump."
9% : They are not, but this fact does not prevent Trump from raising the issue in a televised debate with Harris, during which Trump gives the impression that his debate prep consisted entirely of getting his hair dyed a slightly more believable color.

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