By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

While Australia and other US allies will remain tactful, they were all breathing easier by the end of an explosive fortnight which had begun with a violent act that served only to cement a second Trump presidency.

But then came the 11th-hour withdrawal of a clearly diminished Joe Biden, turning America's presidential race on a dime.

These events have been dizzying. While the failed assassination had swung sentiment towards Trump, Biden's departure brought a change more fundamental than Democrats dared dream.

Already, the Pennsylvania shooter seems old news.

The supposedly settled choice had been a withering one for many voters. Democrats locked into Biden's fading energy believed another Trump term - unthinkable only months ago - had become its opposite: unstoppable.

Now, opinion polls show it is evenly poised - although the swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin will still decide the outcome. Donations and volunteers are flooding in for Vice-President Kamala Harris's campaign with younger voters, people of colour, and particularly women re-engaging.

Suddenly, election 2024 is not a tawdry rerun of 2020 with the same two ageing white men. It is no longer even two men. Neither are both candidates old, or even white. Now, just one of them is all those things and voters may conclude the rationale for Biden's retirement could equally be applied to Trump.

Much will come down to the ground game of registering voters and then getting them out on election day, or via postal voting. This is a dimension where the Dems have a stronger record.

They want to make the choice one between hope and hate, between a bright future and a divisive alternative. Between soaring optimism and seething resentment.

Some are struggling to adjust to the positive energy and new leadership potential of a Harris presidency. Predictably, Trump's first resort was to infantile insults and fear-mongering spiced always by his trademark misogyny.

He attacks her laugh, suggesting it shows she is "crazy". What is it about a competent woman that so frightens conservative men?

We saw this fear with Julia Gillard when a grubby tabloid narrative centred on her childlessness along with dog-whistled suspicions that she was not wired like ordinary folk.

JD Vance, Trump's hand-picked and radically right-wing running mate relishes that challenge, minus the dog-whistle.

"We're effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat-ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too," he told Fox News in 2021.

"It's just a basic fact, if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg (Biden's transport secretary, who is gay), AOC (Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children and how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?"

Childless cat-ladies? No stake in the country?

With antediluvian ideas like that, the election is shaping as a choice between contemporary America's reality and nostalgia for the beloved discriminations of a past long gone.

Of the two visions, surely the latter is the more radical?

It proposes to unwind the defining socio-economic progress which marks liberal democracy's superiority over autocracy and theocracy. A vision straight out of the 1950s.

The important question now is how the Harris v Trump contest will be reported?

In one fell swoop, media have lost their only excuse for not focusing squarely on the real story in 2024 - the unprecedented possibility of reinstalling an election-denying convicted criminal in the White House. One who plans to substantially alter the country, its government, and its role in the world. One, unburdened by the legal guardrails previously thought to delimit a president's authority.

Are media players up to this most threshold of truth tests? Can they withstand the blowback?

Simply because the Democratic candidate would be the first woman of colour in the White House does not give media the right to replace their preoccupation in Biden's observable decline with a whole new preoccupation around Harris.

She should not become another distraction from reporting the Republican candidate's manifest dishonesty and unfitness for high office.

Put another way, the history-making prospect of a first female president does not of itself make Harris a radical candidate. Rather, she is the conventional candidate, the orthodox pick - already tested as a former attorney-general of California, a former United States senator, and a current VP.

Trump by contrast is a known dilettante. A failed and felonious president. A jury-convicted criminal who faces further criminal proceedings and who denied the last election result. A liar who shamelessly stacked the courts, who unethically and illegally pressed state electoral officials to rort the outcome of state ballots, and who fomented a deadly insurrection to prevent the election's certification.

As Biden's age became a cumulative distraction, Trump's blizzard of lies and clear moral unfitness took a back seat.

But what about now? It should be Trump's mental incapacities and criminality that warrant scrutiny.

The only convictions on Harris's record are the hucksters, frauds and predators she's had sent down.

Men, as she says, like Donald J Trump.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.