Skip Bayless questioned Kamala Harris's leadership, praised Donald Trump’s “Patton-like” qualities and casted doubt on the voting process. Credit: The Skip Bayless Show

Skip Bayless talks about politics exactly the way he talks about sports.

In talking about the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election, Bayless wondered if Vice President Kamala Harris was the “dynamic leader and decision maker this country needs and deserves.” The 72-year-old Bayless was so, so close to making another quarterback cliche before he waxed poetic about Oprah Winfrey speaking at the Democratic National Convention.

If Oprah was running for president, Skip would vote for her. The same goes for Maryland Governor Wes Moore.

“But, Kamala, I don’t know,” he said on his The Skip Bayless Show. “The best thing I can say about Kamala is she’d be OK, not bad, just fine. But rare? Special? Dynamic? I don’t know. Maybe I’d be pleasantly surprised once she took over. But I believe that many people, maybe a majority of people voting for Kamala, are doing so by default. They’re voting for Kamala only because there’s no way they’d vote for Donald Trump.

“It’s not that they believe deeply in Kamala…it’s just that they have condemned Donald Trump as a far-right psycho that cannot be allowed back into power. I believe that for many, if not most Kamala supporters, that this isn’t about her, it’s just about him. ‘Vote for her to counteract the misguided fools who are voting for him.’ For me, that sounds like double jeopardy. It could just be that neither candidate is qualified to run this country.”

Only one candidate incited a violent insurrection to overturn the 2020 election results—and it wasn’t Kamala Harris.

But as Bayless pivoted to Trump, he seemed to see qualities that he didn’t find present in the Vice President.

“I will say this about Donald Trump: I do not share a number of his views, maybe many of his views, but I do believe he’s a natural-born leader who isn’t afraid to make tough decisions and who, however, you want to explain it, has been very lucky through his life; see the little scar on his ear as opposed to a hole in his head,” said Bayless. “I’ll go with lucky over blessed because I’m just not sure either he or Kamala truly believe in a higher power, truly worship that higher power, truly pray for divine guidance.

“I know what they’ve said publicly, but I’m just not sure either candidate has God in his or her heart. I have pretty good instincts about this, and I’m just not convinced. Of course, that scares the hell out of me; maybe into me.”

Are these the same instincts that led Bayless to believe that Trump is a natural-born leader?

“But, I will say this about Donald Trump: he does have what I call, if you will, General (George S.) Patton in him. You know, General Patton before World War II, way before some of your times, look him up. Donald Trump has some hard-ass commander in him. When we were at war, World War II with the Japanese in the Pacific Theater and Hitler in Europe…I’m sure glad we had General Patton on our side. He was a bad motor scooter.

“Sometimes, if you want to preserve your freedom from superpowers that want to take it from you, you need a Patton on your side at the controls, even if you don’t believe in his politics.”

There are a couple of issues with the analogy, starting with the fact that Trump has long shown his admiration for dictators; he dodged service to Vietnam on five occasions, reportedly making up a false injury, per his former lawyer. To say nothing of the time, he said Americans who died in the war are “losers” and “suckers.”

“I do believe in the Bible and the Old and the New Testament,” Bayless said. “And I do try to live my life by the Bible, and I believe with all my heart and all my soul that if our country does not support Israel,  our country will fall. Please understand that every time I pray, I pray for the Palestinian victims of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I pray that it will end with some kind of peaceful coexistence, as unrealistic as that might be.

“But, all I know for sure is that we do elect a regime that turns its back on Israel — we will fail, and we will fall. That’s just my spiritual, biblical belief. It sounds like Trump is more inclined to support Israel. I know what Kamala has said about doing everything in her power to end the Gaza conflict; I’m sorry, I never know what to believe anymore from one side or the other.

“Every time I talk myself into nearly voting for Trump, he makes another outlandish, outrageous statement that makes me question what he’s made of,” Bayless continued. “I mean, if you’re Donald freakin’ Trump, you’re a former President of the United States; you’re arguably the most recognizable man in the world; one of the most successful businessmen in the history of the world; you don’t need to lie exaggerate or even embellish the truth. You should be so much better than that. You’ve earned being better than that.

“Yet, too often, Donald Trump, to me, is a victim and prisoner of his own raging insecurity. He shrinks his own magnitude. I don’t understand it. He reveals himself to be so much smaller than he is. He should be so much more confident in what he actually has achieved. It’s real. It’s right there. He doesn’t need to stoop to taking petty, small-minded, bogus potshots.

“He can be so much more commanding than Kamala can be. He can be so much more in charge…He can be that when he doesn’t diminish his own power. I like him much better when he’s just boasting about himself instead of trying to tear down Kamala and other detractors, as you well know.”

While he didn’t come out and say who he will be voting for on Tuesday, Skip added that he didn’t know if he could even trust the voting process anymore.

“How many votes are being allowed from people that are not even U.S. citizens, I have no idea,” he says. “Don’t know what to trust anymore.”

[The Skip Bayless Show]

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.