The state of play with about 100 days to the presidential election was that one party was so united behind their leader, who escaped an assassination attempt they credit to divine intervention, that they let him write their election manifesto and endorsed it without debate or changes.

It did not matter to delegates at the recent Republican National Convention that they were offering to voters a candidate who was twice impeached by Congress, was convicted of sexual assault and paying an adult film star hush money to cover up a sexual encounter to influence an election. Or that he has been charged with inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, interfering with the results of the 2020 vote and illegally taking home secret national security documents and refusing to turn them over.

But that is the hold which Donald Trump has over the Republican Party, facilitated by billionaires pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into his campaign and a vast network of “think-tanks” that has been paving the way for decades so someone like him can emerge and lead the counter-revolution of the wealthy at a time of growing diversity in the nation.

The state of play also, up to recently, found the other major party in such disarray that it looked like they needed their own act of God to be able to make even a face-saving showing at the polls in November. The Democratic Party formed what some commentators described as a circular firing squad as they tried to grapple with a leadership crisis.

That happened even though their leader was the direct opposite of Trump. Joe Biden drew favorable comparison with Franklin Delano Roosevelt for his progressive policies. He championed the poor and civil rights. He signed legislation and executive orders that include devoting trillions of dollars to infrastructure upgrade, expanded health care and child care, provided students with debt relief, tackled climate change and strengthened relations with foreign allies.

But some in Biden’s party were rewarding him not with the sort of unanimous acclamation that Trump’s supporters have given him–instead clamoring for him to quit – because he is three years older than Trump and had a bad debate night. Finally, he surrendered on July 21.

Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination but even that came amid concern that Trump will defeat her and that the candidate should be selected in an open process. But Harris, who seems set to clinch the nomination, will bring to the campaign something that has been missing from politics for years: joy. That laugh of hers should be trademarked – but it hides the toughness of a former prosecutor.

Less than 48 hours after Biden quit, the potential campaign of the former California attorney general raised more than $100 million, secured enough delegates to become the candidate and, as some reports quipped, the race is now between the prosecutor and the perpetrator.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds – 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,” Harris declared as she launched her campaign – a 59-yearold Asian American woman taking on a 78-year-old European American.

Game on.

But the bickering over Biden prevented Democrats from unleashing a full offensive against Trump. They failed to give sufficient prominence to the elimination of the federal right to abortions by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, affecting the nation’s 169 million women, that Trump is responsible for by appointing three of the Justices. So, too, with the threat which they are certain Trump poses to American democracy. Biden did hammer Republicans on such issues but his ageism got in the way.

As a result, Republicans have been given free rein to hammer them on immigration and play to their base, including those who push the Great Replacement Theory and loss of jobs, especially, Trump claims, wrongly, among African Americans. Democrats have yet to highlight the fact strongly enough that Trump plans to deport around 10 million undocumented residents, almost all of them non-European Americans.

In addition, the inability to resolve the leadership dispute left Democrats with the unresolved question of the future of the party. That is in sharp contrast with Trump’s selecting Ohio Sen. James David ( JD) Vance as his running mate and likely heir-apparent.

Vance, 39, shot to superstar fame with his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” which recounts his growing pains in an Appalachian community ravaged by extreme poverty and devastating opioid addiction. Liberals read the book as an indictment of Republican politics and Vance stoked that perspective with derogatory comments about Trump.

On different occasions, Vance called Trump “a cynical a..hole”; “America’s Hitler”; “a total fraud”; “obnoxious”: “an idiot” and accused him of being a purveyor of “cultural heroin,” as well as “leading the white working class to a very dark place” and being “unfit for our nation’s highest office.”

Vance rose above his humble beginnings to enlist in the U.S. Marines, attend The Ohio State University and Yale Law School and become a venture capitalist. Then he succumbed to the allure of elitism, especially through his association with Peter Thiel, the billionaire who became his patron and who claims that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

Vance underwent his ideological transformation as he prepared for what would be a successful Senate campaign, aided by millions of dollars from Thiel and, critically, an endorsement from Trump, who, out of character, set aside the past attacks on him.

Vance began his journey into Trumpland with his first visit to Mara-Lago in 2021. Confronted then by Trump with copies of his criticisms, Vance told the former president that, in the words of The New York Times, “he had bought into what he described as media lies and that he was sorry he got it wrong.”

Still, it took years before Trump was persuaded to tap Vance as his running mate, mainly through the intercession of his son Donald Jr. and a variety of others, including Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, according to The Times.

Vance is not simply an ideological turncoat. Politico’s Ian Ward wrote in March that Vance and a “New Right cohort” see Trump “as merely the first step in a broader populist-nationalist revolution that is already reshaping the American right — and, if they get their way, that will soon reshape America as a whole.”

Vance, Ward wrote, believes that “America is teetering on the brink of complete civilizational collapse.” In response, Vance told him that “decline often proceeds periods of renewal” and that the political class, which he dubbed “the regime,” is unwilling or unable to grapple with the “fundamental stagnation at the heart of American society.”

Vance does not believe that four more years of Trump would be enough time to realize Vance’s vision of the country, Ward wrote, “but he believes that electing Trump represents the only hope that Americans have for getting off the path to literal civilization collapse – and he is prepared to go to extreme – and possibly unconstitutional – lengths to ensure that outcome.”

Indian American essayist and teacher Neema Avashia, who was also raised in Appalachia, rejected Vance’s rags-to-riches story in “Hillbilly Elegy.” She wrote in The Guardian on July 16 that the book is “a political platform masquerading as memoir.” She described Vance as “an opportunist … willing to double down on stereotypes, to paint the people of Appalachia with a culture of poverty brush, rather than be honest about the ways in which both electoral politics and industry have failed our region.”

Now it remains for Harris, if nominated, to choose her running mate and further define the vast differences between her and Trump. The choice could not be more stark.

In any case, neither Trumpism nor the vision which Vance and his “New Right cohorts” have will solve the problems of a nation in which the European American population has decreased from around 80 percent in 1980 to 59 percent and will be a minority by 2045. It will not deal with the legacy of the historic wrongs committed against the Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans — including the seizure of lands given to them after slavery ended to build new lives. The result of that injustice can be seen, for example, on Skidway Island in Georgia, where waterfront estates developed in The Landings on stolen land are worth millions of dollars, as noted in a Mother Jones feature headlined “40 Acres and a Lie.”