As we reach the final hours of the presidential campaign (it feels like it started in 1860 in more ways than one), the time has come for the closing arguments.

Vice President Kamala Harris gave one of her final pitches on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., the staging site of so much love on Jan. 6, 2021. In her speech on Tuesday evening, she noted that the founders “did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant. These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised.”

Oh, most important to the Arnold Palmer-minded crowd-size aficionado former President Donald Trump, she had 75,000 people there. That’s huge, as one might say.

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To sum up, she acted and sounded like a future president of the United States.

Honestly, I am not sure precisely how to characterize Trump’s closing argument — but here’s an attempt:

“Ban pet-eating in Central Ohio? I’m not a Nazi? Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage? I’m glad Steve Bannon is now free? Kamabla isn’t Black? Hitler’s generals were totally awesome? The United States is a leaking septic tank?”

In some other world, where America was a little greater than it happens to be at this fraught moment, a GOP presidential candidate might have said something like,........

© San Francisco Chronicle