(It’s been a while since I have written. My last community column in The Sentinel was published in May, and Gannett, the corporation that owns the newspaper, does not want local opinion writers to address national issues. That has given me an unanticipated summer vacation.)

It has been an eventful summer, politically speaking.

The Republican convention was held in mid-July, just two days after an assassination attempt on candidate Donald Trump. The convention rallied to Trump, with 93% of the delegates endorsing the former president. At the convention, Trump announced JD Vance, junior senator from Ohio, as his running mate.

Three days after the convention, President Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Shock waves reverberated on both sides of our country’s political divide. By Aug. 6, just a little more than two weeks later, Vice President Kamala Harris was certified as the Democratic candidate. That same day, she announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.

Since then, on the Republican side, we have witnessed Vance place his foot firmly in his mouth, and then double down with both feet. The internet is awash in single cat lady memes, Vance’s derisive term for childless women.

People are struggling to understand how, in a democracy, parenthood should confer extra voting rights. Women of all ages — even us postmenopausal ladies — are shaking our heads at Vance’s view of women: pregnancy is a woman’s highest duty; pregnancy should be policed and monitored by the government; IVF is bad because some eggs are discarded, and because sperm is produced outside of sex; older childless women are meant to be babysitters. Vance admires the nuclear family, headed by a male, whose wife bears an eerie resemblance to June Cleaver.

Where does a woman running for president fit into this scheme of things? She doesn’t.

At the same time, we are treated to endless media coverage of the presidential candidate himself, Donald Trump. He is said to be fuming over Biden’s withdrawal because it took away one of the major themes of his candidacy: that Biden was too old to be president. Robbed of that line of attack, he is trying out various insults aimed at Harris: she laughs too much; her laugh is “crazy;” she isn’t really Black (ask her sorority sisters about that one!); she is a DEI candidate; she isn’t smart.

Trump held two press conferences so far this month. His conferences are long monologues — sometimes more than an hour — in which he returns to old themes and rambles on unexpected tangents on the price of bacon (unaffordable), the government forcing everyone to buy electric cars (untrue), the size of his crowds rivaling MLK’s (untrue), claims that Biden will crash the Democratic convention and take back the nomination. His own speech has been characterized as “word salad”: sentences meandering according to his meandering train of thought.

Meanwhile, Harris and Walz project energy, enthusiasm, and — dare I say it — JOY at being in the race. They speak coherently to big crowds (truly big, not just AI-enhanced). They draw people who are tired of the dark politics of the Republican standard bearers. They appeal to women and their allies who are sick of conversations that end in the government controlling women’s health. They appeal to union workers, teachers, and veterans who refuse to disrespect other veterans’ service. They make the case that government can improve life for people who don’t already have big bank accounts and corporate perks.

This big, mid-summer shift in the political landscape has emboldened the media to cover Trump with more scrutiny. In one of Trump’s August press events, NPR “found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute.”

The media is drawing attention to Trump’s inability to stay on topic, to his petty name-calling and bluster, and even to his age and health. (He is, after all, only three years younger than Biden.). They have reminded us that this man sounds the same as he always has — painting American cities as unlivable due to crime, exaggerating the danger posed by immigrants, promising draconian revenge for his enemies. He speaks of deportation camps, mobilization of the military on American soil, and loyalty tests for federal employees.

Trump looks at America and sees a scary country full of woke people trying to limit the power of white men to run the world just as he has run his businesses. He is angry about a lot of things, and willing to take all that anger out on the most vulnerable: LGBTQ+ people, single mothers, educators and immigrants.

And suddenly, it’s a new game.

Voters are looking at Trump critically, mostly because we have been offered a more attractive alternative. The Harris-Walz campaign encourages us to open up to differences, not suppress them. They believe in science driving policy, rather than using policy to hamstring science.

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They support policies that expand health care and lower drug costs. They see making tampons available to menstruating school kids as commonsense kindness — not an attempt to influence a kid’s sexual identity. They are not, in fact, hung up on genitalia at all, believing, as Walz said, that the government should mind its own damn business.

And beyond all that, there is one more thing. The Donald Trump show is old. We’ve seen it before. We have seen the theatrical descent down the escalator at Trump Tower. We’ve seen him hug the flag and throw paper towels in Puerto Rico after a hurricane. We’ve heard him mock and denigrate John McCain and countless others. We’ve heard his dark message about American carnage that only he can fix. We are tired of this show, and ready to change the channel.

Is there light at the end of this tunnel? I think we are beginning to see it.

— Community Columnist Barbara Mezeske is a retired teacher and resident of Holland. She can be reached at bamezeske@gmail.com.