"Honeyed Words": Twelve Key Themes

at the Capitalist-Imperialist DNC in Racist Chicago

I was in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention (DNC).

I walked and biked past thousands and thousands of riot cops.  I passed caravans of police vehicles blaring sirens as they whisked big shots through city streets.  

I got into the DNC party for the media with an old press pass. It was free booze and great food for three hours.  The twenty or so media people (no big names – sorry) I spoke with made little effort to hide their enthusiasm for a candidate my comrades and I call “Killer Kopmala.” (I had to get out of this event before getting too drunk to ride a Divvy bike home.)

I joined three protest marches, one with a thousand or so folks down Michigan Avenue in support of reproductive rights, and two much larger ones in support of Gaza on the official protest route a mile or so away from the main convention site the United Center.

I got to hug Brother Cornel West. He called me a truth teller: no lie! (The love that flows from and to that man is something to see!)

I marched with the Revcoms (revolutionary communists) and briefly led (or tried to lead) Revcom chants under the Lake Street Elevated tracks three nights ago:   

Fascist Trump, No! Killer Kamala No!/The Whole Damn System Has to Go!

From Palestine to the USA, Revolution is the Way!

One, two, three, four, slavery genocide and war/five, six, seven, eight, America was never great!

From Palestine to Mexico, the Border Walls Have to Go!

(I was informed by a younger comrade that I did not keep the proper rhythm!)

I covered a righteous Revcom “Stolen Lives” press conference featuring moving testimony from the loved ones of Black people murdered by police in Chicago and Cleveland. I joined the Revcoms’ march to the headquarters of the fascist-led Chicago Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) for a speak out in front of dozens of faceless riot cops.

I visited Cheri Honkala’s Poor People’s group in the city’s longtime Puerto Rican neighborhood Humboldt Park.  

I sounded out activists from four different officially “Marxist” groups (the PLS, the SEP, the RCA/IMT, and  and FRSO), all claiming to speak for “the working class” and in the name of class struggle (more on that in a future commentary).

I engaged with dozens of people, some affiliated with left organizations and others not, on what’s happening in Gaza, the US, and around the world.

I took pictures of Chicago riot cops arresting anti-genocide protesters who broke through some mental fencing south of the United Center, the main DNC site.  I did the same in the West Loop, a few blocks from the Israeli consulate, where as many as sixty activists were roughly “kettled” and thrown in paddy wagons.  

I witnessed a small group of Nazi provocateurs spark violence at the last big protest rally.

But on to my main topic….

Twelve DNC Themes

I’ve read and in many cases listened to the main speeches that were delivered at the DNC. I can report that all of these highly choreographed orations were framed on the terms and within the ideological framework of US capitalist and imperialist nationalism.

I have discerned twelve key and overlapping themes in these speeches and in the mainstream liberal media’s celebratory presentation of the convention:

1. Faux Progressivism/Manipulation of Populism: fake-progressive statements of concern and readiness to “fight” for ordinary working folks combined with promises to enact policies to help the people in their contest with the privileged Few. In other words, “the manipulation of populism by elitism” that Christopher Hitchens once identified as “the essence of American politics.” One Dem speaker after another including presidential nominee Kamala Harris used their mouths to write checks they know very well their donors and the American economic and political system will never let the Democrats cash. This rhetorical progressivism and populism were and are pure pretense. The chances of the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems’ egalitarian-sounding promises and pledges producing policy are nil thanks to the underlying capitalist plutocracy and the “outlier” Minority Rule nature of the US electoral and governance order. An amusing contradiction noted by the snotty liberal comedian Stephen Colbert merits reference here: DNC delegates clapped madly when the “socialist” and supposed Independent Bernie Sanders denounced “the billionaire class” of “oligarchs” and  roared their approval when Illinois governor Jamie Pritzker (an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune) identified as an actual billionaire while mocking Trump’s claims of oligarch status.

2. Candidate Qualities: oodles of teary-eyed testimony were offered on the supposed wonderful and caring, deeply democratic personal history of the party’s presidential and vice-presidential nominees. Never mind – speaking of faux progressivism – “Killer Kopmala’s” history as a mass incarcerator and as the number-two person in an administration that has carried out a deadly, reckless, and imperialist proxy war in Ukraine and that has armed savage genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Never mind Harris coming to her Ziofascist friend (and then Chicago mayor) Rahm Emanuel’s 2013 Chicago Ideas Conference to creepily mock Oakland progressives who wanted (imagine!) to shift money from mass incarceration to public education. (Harris accused mass imprisonment opponents of being unable to explain why she and her wealthy husband “have to keep three locks on our front door”). Never mind her “folksy” running mate Tim Walz’s support as Minnesota governor for the ecocidal Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, his deployment of Minnesota State Patrol and Department of Natural Resources officers along with the Minnesota National Guard to brutally repress the beautiful George Floyd Rebellion, and the turning of his back on the 2023 Minneapolis teachers’ strike despite his own history as a teachers union member.  

3. Rags to Riches/Log Cabin Mythology/“Anything is Possible in America”: Kamala Harris was repeatedly hailed as an embodiment of “the American Dream” of limitless  upward mobility in a land so full of glorious opportunity that anyone can become president – a US campaign narrative going back to the days of Andrew Jackson and seized upon by Bill Clinton (from “a trailer park in Arkansas”) and Barack Obama (“a skinny Black guy with big ears from the South Side of Chicago”).  Never mind that Harris’s parents were highly successful and tenured academics and that the extremely class- and race-divided and unequal United States possesses the lowest rate of upward social mobility among the world’s rich industrialized states. Harris worked at a McDonald’s as a teenager, don’t you know? And her vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz wears flannel and coached high school football in his native Nebraska!

4. Identitarian Diversity and “Inclusion”: Again and again the speakers and their media cheerleaders exulted about the remarkable racial, ethnic and gender, and sexual orientation diversity on display at the DNC from the top of the ticket down to the delegates on the floor. As numerous media cheerleaders accurately pointed out, there was a big contrast here between the DNC and the whiteness and hyper-masculinism of the Republican National Convention last month in Milwaukee.  What MSNBC talking heads failed to point out, however, was the simple fact that switching up the color/race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation/identity of faces in high, public, and political places is not at all the same as fundamentally challenging and changing the underlying oppression and exploitation structures of racism, class, ethno-centrism, nationalism, nativism, and patriarchy, none of which can be meaningfully overcome under US capitalism-imperialism.

The diversity-pandering was and is about giving the US bourgeois order an identitarian re-branding. It’s an exercise in cloaking the American system’s deep investment in all the overlapping and mutually reinforcing inequality, exploitation, and oppression structures rooted in and allied to capitalist class dictatorship. As Frantz Fanon wrote in his book  Black Skin, White Mask, “What matters is not so much the color of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.” Ditto for gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and identity, and the class of your family of origin.

Even on its own bourgeois-identitarian terms, moreover, the DNC was torn by some glaring contradictions. It promoted as a champion and embodiment of diversity and “inclusion” a presidential candidate (Harris) who:

• made her political chops by disproportionately locking up Black and Brown people.

• went down to the southern US border as US Vice President and told Mexican and Central American migrants “Do Not Come, Do Not Come,” telling them to stay in hellish circumstances that US imperialism has created Latin America.

• boasts about the Biden-Harris administration’s attempt to pass a bipartisan and nativist immigration bill that significantly rolled back protections for immigrants.

At the same time, the “inclusive” and “diverse” DNC refused to let a single solitary Palestinian-American speak at the convention (!) because it knew that any such speaker would criticize the Biden-Harris administration for funding, equipping, and politically, diplomatically and militarily protecting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “Inclusion” was extended to pro-Israel Jewish speakers but not to Palestinian Americans, leading a delegation of “uncommitted” DNC delegates to stage a sit-in outside the convention. That’s selective “inclusion” and exclusion.

5. “Honeyed Words” on “Unity” vs. “Division”: “When Trump comes out with some of his fascist diatribes and rabid attacks,” the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian wrote in 2019, “you’ll hear the Democratic Party complain: ‘He’s not uniting us, he’s dividing us’ – as though everybody could be united if the president, instead of raving in a  rabid fashion, were to say the right honeyed words…[as if stark divisions aren’t] built into this society, and as if you can…just supersede [those divisions] or wave them away by saying honeyed words ‘to unite instead of divide us.’”

That quote from Avakian five years ago reads like a prediction of much of what was said at the DNC last week.  Again and again, Trump and his party were accused of “dividing us” and the Democrats claimed to be forging “unity” in “diversity” in the name of “democracy.”  “Honeyed words” like the statement that “we are one nation, indivisible” flowed like water from the mouths of the speakers, as if Americans don’t live in a nation where the arch-parasitic top tenth of the upper 1 Percent possesses as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent and where the population is deeply “stratified,” “segmented” and segregated along stark and steep lines of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender.  

“She Said ‘Be Quiet Unless You Want to Elect Trump’”

“Unity”? Get a load of what the Zionist Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer had to say about pro-Palestine delegates’ attempt to be heard at the convention. As PBS reported:

“The news that the DNC had denied the request of a Palestinian American speaker, just a day after featuring the parents of an Israeli American hostage held by Hamas, ignited fresh criticism from some on the left…Cook County, where Chicago and the convention is located, holds the largest population of Palestinian Americans in the country. The party, however, has not budged. The Senate’s top Democrat shrugged off the potential political impact of the sit-in outside the convention. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer recalled Harris saying when protesters interrupted her at a recent rally in Michigan that their disruptions might be benefiting Republican Donald Trump. ‘She said, “Be quiet unless you want to elect Trump,”’ Schumer told a small group of reporters on Thursday, ahead of the convention’s final evening. ‘We believe we need unity, and there’s overwhelming — I have never seen such unity,’ he said. ‘A small handful of people does not represent close to even a sliver of where the Democratic Party is right now.’”

Chicago was a curious setting for ritual talk of “unity.” It’s the nation’s most segregated city. Chicago’s white-Black dissimilarity index is 80.04, meaning that 80 percent of either whites or Blacks would have to move in order for the two groups to be evenly distributed across Chicago’s census tracts. The United Center is something of a buffer between the city’s gentrified West Loop and a vast stretch of hyper-segregated and deeply impoverished Black ghetto in a city so savagely unequal (please see my 2007 book Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History) that residents of the affluent white neighborhood of Streeterville live thirty years longer than residents of  Black neighborhood of Englewood.

6. What Genocide?/Pretending to Have Nothing to Do with the Slaughter in Gaza: The Jerusalem Post put it mildly in its reporting on the DNC: “Democratic Party tiptoes nimbly around Israel at DNC. The Democratic Party carefully navigated itself, avoiding major Israel-related controversies while sidestepping direct mentions of Israel in key speeches.”  The US-Israel genocide in Gaza was invisible at the convention.  Look at how “Killer Kamala” addressed the Gaza matter in her nomination acceptance speech:

“And let me be clear. I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on Oct. 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival. At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

Beyond the standard statements of US support for (its imperial asset) Israel and horror at October 7th and Hamas, notice how Harris deletes the sheer genocidal arch-criminality of the US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza and distances the US and the Biden-Harris administration from “what has happened in Gaza over the past ten months.”  The ethnic cleansing operation has involved the mass slaughter of families and children with US munitions and under the military, economic, political, and diplomatic protection of the Biden-Harris White House and the US Pentagon and State Department.  Here is an excellent statement that has been making the rounds on social media: “Watching crowds gathered to cheerfully support a person carrying out an ongoing live-streamed genocide while pretending to have nothing to do with it is one of the most vile things I’ve ever seen.”

7. “Forward” vs “Backward”: a recurrent DNC chant was “We Won’t Go Back,” meaning a refusal to embrace the reactionary Christian white nationalism of the Republi-fascist Party and Project 2025. The slogan placed at the bottom of the Obama-modelled Kamala posters and signs is “FORWARD,” replacement and update for the 1992 Clinton and 2008 Obama keywords HOPE and CHANGE. Never mind that the Harris-Walz campaign is committed to the preservation of an archaic Minority Rule model of bourgeois democracy based on a “principled compromise” required by 18^th Century slaveowners – a “democracy” under whose ancient rules Harris must defeat Trump by four or more percentage points in the national popular vote to prevail (under the Electoral College).  It’s a “democracy” with an absurdly powerful and malapportioned, right-tilted upper legislative branch – the US Senate – that will veto the liberal bills (abortion rights, voting rights, gun safety, and more) Harris promised to sign as president – and with a corrupt, illegitimate, and absurdly lifetime-appointed Supreme Court that is under the control of a Christian Fascist Trump majority (one that recently ruled that presidents are immune for crimes committed in connection with their official duties – a blank check for executive dictatorship.) It’s a capitalist “democracy” where concentrated wealth controls both parties and pre-empts progressive, majority-backed socioeconomic policies like Single Payer health insurance, an increased federal minimum wage, and card check union authorization. It’s a “democracy” set atop, captive to, and conditioned and controlled by an underlying capitalist mode of production that is cancelling all prospects for a decent future through environmental ruin led by the capitalogenic climate catastrophe.  It’s a “democracy” dedicated to an imperial order that is tipping humanity ever closer to a nuclear global war.  The underlying capitalist economic system and its overlying political and ideological superstructure stands in fundamental opposition to the forward continuation of decent life on Earth!

The Republicans are not without their own version of “forward” – forward into fascism, a radical if counterrevolutionary break with what’s left of previously normative US bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and rule of law democracy.  Building a serious alternative to that horrific future isn’t about remaining stuck in the quicksand of that bourgeois democracy; it’s about the embrace and advance of a socialist revolution that “constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and the emergence of a classless society” (Marx, Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, 1852) – and the abolition of all the different forms of social oppression that correspond to capitalist social relations. That’s the real and desirable FORWARD that the Dems can and never will embrace.

8. Fascism Denial: If a single DNC speaker had the decency and intelligence to properly identify the other party and its maniacal Hitler-channeling presidential candidate Trump as fascist, I didn’t hear it.  I was slightly impressed by the candor in the following reflection in former US president Bill Clinton’s DNC address:

“The other day, [Trump] implied that if his people voted one more time, they’d be able to rig it from now on and they wouldn’t have to vote again. You think they’re kidding, but I know a lot of these folks, and most of them are really good people, but some of them think that they are bound to dominate America politically, economically, and socially, and they have to use politics, do it, and they should rig the system…. So here’s what I want to tell you. We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us, when we thought it couldn’t happen…you should never underestimate your adversary (emphasis added).”

It's my educated guess that Clinton, like Obama, knows that “these folks” who think they are “bound to dominate America” (including “most[ly] …really good people”?!) are in fact 21^st Century Amerikaner fascists. (I detect Clinton’s understanding of this in his phrase “thought it couldn’t happen,” which echoes the America exceptionalism-mocking title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel about a fascist takeover of the US --- It Can’t Happen Here).  But like Obama, who made his understanding of Trump’s fascism clear in private before the 2016 election, neither Clinton nor other top Democrats want to say the dreaded “F-word” because a serious engagement with fascism requires a mass movement beneath and beyond the quadrennial major party candidate-centered corporate-crafted capitalist-imperialist electoral extravaganzas that they want the US masses to see as the only politics that matters.   

9. “Do Something”: This was a recurrent phrase at the DNC, highlighted in Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris’s speeches: “don’t just complain, do something!” Remember Obama’s constant mantra “Get things done!” Well, gosh, Hitler did some things in Europe between 1933 and 1945.  The genocidal fascist mass murderer Bibi Netanyahu and Joe Biden have been doing some (terrible) things to Gaza over the last ten months. The US Empire has sure as Hell done a lot of (terrible) things to the world in the present and previous two centuries, murdering and maiming untold millions of people in North America and around the world (for some key post-1945 details, please see my 2018 essay “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony”).

Of course, we all know what the DNC speakers mean by “do something.”  They mean one thing and one thing only: get out the vote for Democrats and above all for Kamala Harris.  Never mind the remarkable flaws of the US electoral system even on elementary bourgeois-democratic grounds (Marxist critique and analysis aside): the open violations of “one person, one vote” built into the Electoral College, US Senate apportionment, rampant gerrymandering, widespread voter suppression and obstruction (which will reach new heights in Republi-fascist controlled jurisdictions this year), states’ rights, and unelected and lifetime appointed Supreme Court.

+10. The Horse Race: If any of the DNC speakers tried to move folks’ focus off the presidential horse race and on to the constitutional crisis and civil conflict likely to follow the vote, I didn’t hear it.  Maybe the topic came up on the floor and in private and conference rooms (how it can be avoided is a mystery) but the main speeches contained no serious discussion of the obstruction and disruption certain to come after the election and how “We the People” need to prepare. Tim Walz’s call for Americans to “leave it all on the field” of the election contest is bad advice.  Folks better have lots of energy left in the tank and plans for the big ugly aftermath. We now live in a time when one of the two dominant US capitalist-imperialist political parties has gone fascist and therefore does not accept defeat in mere elections  Fascism doesn’t disappear because of an election. Massive conflict and possibly even something like civil war seems distinctly possible if Harris prevails.  But I would not rule violence out even if the Republi-fascists win, which is very possible thanks to the slaveowners’ Electoral College despite the big Kamala Vibe/re-brand: millions of Americans are not going to accept a second Trump presidency as legitimate.  I certainly won’t.  A question for my fellow Americans: how many more times will you accept the presidency of a candidate who lost the national popular vote like George W. Bush in 2000-01 and Adolf Trump in 2016?  

+11. Joy/“Happy Warriors”/Love: Again and again, the 2024 DNC speakers contrasted their party’s happiness, love, and joy with Trump and the Republi-fascists’ negativity, whining,  and complaint. What gets lost in this contrast is the difference between (a) vicious neofascist unhappiness over the absence of Christian white nationalist rule (the actual “Republican” goal) in the US and (b) decent and principled unhappiness over terrible things like the Biden-Harris-sparked inter-imperialist slaughter in Ukraine, the Biden-Harris-backed genocide in Gaza, and the Biden-Harris administration’s encouragement of escalated US oil drilling even as humanity just endured the fossil-fueled hottest days and summer on record, including a day in which it was warmer above the Arctic Circle than it was in southern Texas.

Love? On the convention’s first night, thousands of DNC delegates and convention attendees chanted “We love you Joe!”  As Bob Avakian pointed out yesterday, (I’m putting this essay up on August 25^th), they “might as well” have chanted “We Love Genocide.” As Avakian elaborates:  

“On the opening night of the convention they repeatedly chanted that they loved Genocide Joe Biden—who, as President, is responsible for arming and fully backing Israel in its genocide against the Palestinian people—with more than forty thousand Palestinians in Gaza slaughtered, including huge numbers of children. In light of this orgy of love for this mass murderer, Joe Biden, it is worth repeating again the following from [an earlier] message: Stop and get this image fully in your mind: the millions of Palestinians in Gaza, subjected to daily terror by Israel, forced to live amidst disease-ridden rivers of human waste and other filth, with little food, and health care facilities destroyed—and every day loved ones’ limbs are blown off and brains blown out by massive Israeli bombs and other weapons supplied by the U.S. government. More than 15 thousand Palestinian children blown apart in this way…As if that weren’t horrific enough, shortly before this Democratic Party convention, a report, ‘Welcome to Hell,’ was issued by the Israeli human rights group B`Tselem which documented the fact that Israeli prisons, which for decades have held huge numbers of Palestinian civilians, have now been fully turned into torture chambers, where Palestinian prisoners—civilians, many of them children—are systematically and repeatedly brutalized in the most depraved ways, including by raping them with various objects.”

I repeat, the “inclusive” DNC didn’t allow a single Palestinian-American to speak.  The reason for that was that such a speaker would have spoken out against these horrific crimes, suggesting that that he Dems were trying “to Put the Joy in Genocide,” to quote the Revcoms.   

+12. “Heart and Soul” National Chauvinism: Last but not least, the DNC was animated by national chauvinism on steroids. On its opening nigs and throughout the convention, the crowd in Chicago’s United Center chanted “USA, USA,” earning praise for “lavish patriotism” from the blubbering bourgeois pundit David Brooks.  This fervent nationalism was especially pronounced on the first night, when Joe Biden criticized Trump’s “declining nation” narrative by boasting of America’s “record high stock market” and vomiting up this vapid nonsense: “Name me a country in the world that doesn’t think we’re the leading nation in the world. Without America—not a joke, think about it, I’m being literal—who can lead the world other than the United States of America? Well, guess what? America’s winning and the world’s better off for it.”

What a load of crap. Countries don’t think, human beings do, and most politically cognizant humans think of the US as a menace, a selfish empire, and an exploiter/oppressor, not a  world “leader.” Most of humanity does not think the US “winning” anything is good for the world. (For elaboration on this and further reflections on the imperialist DNC and the protests outside the imperialist love fest, please see my August 21st interview by Andy Zee on the Revcoms’ Revolution Nothing Less Show (go to minute for my appearance but please watch the entire episode).

At the end of his DNC speech, the 2002-03 Iraq invasion cheerleader and the 2023-24 Genocide backer Joe Biden signed off with a maudlin and chilling statement and prayer: “For 50 years, like many of you, I’ve given my heart and soul to our nation…Folks, we just have to remember who we are. We’re the United States of America. And there's nothing we cannot do when we do it together. God bless you all, and may God protect our troops. Thank you.

Harris intoned the following cold imperialist and national-chauvinist claims in her acceptance speech:

“As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.… I will make sure that we lead the world into the future….That America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership…I love our country with all my heart….I see an America where we hold fast to the fearless belief that built our nation and inspired the world. That here, in this country, anything is possible… America, let us show each other and the world who we are and what we stand for: Freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibilities…We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world. .. It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love, to fight for the ideals we cherish and to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American. So let’s get out there, let’s fight for it. Let’s get out there, let’s vote for it, and together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told. Thank you. God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America. Thank you.”

“USA, USA!, USA, USA!”

It was nauseating. Let me conclude by offering an antidote Harris’ notion of “the fearless belief” in “democracy” that supposedly “built our nation and inspired the world,” and to Biden’s repeated claims that the United States “democracy” has been “the envy of the world for more than twenty-four decades.”  Please make sure to read and re-read Frederick Douglass’s epic 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Meaning of the Fourth of July,” where Douglass said the following:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”

One hundred and seventy-two years after Douglass gave perhaps the greatest oration in American history, Kamala Harris is in danger of losing to the fascist white supremacist woman hater Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump even if she gets more votes then he does thanks to the Electoral College, an institution developed as part of a “principled compromise” at the end of the US Constitutional Convention in order to stop the young republic’s slave states from leaving the new imperial nation.