MOST LIKELY TO BECOME Charles

HARRISON R. T. WARD

Ialways had this intellectual picture of what the U.S. looked like,” Charles X. Hua ’22-23 tells me. In reading the news and listening to radio and podcasts, he says he found a narrative of “negativity, of toxicity, of polarization, of conflict.”

It wasn’t until he took an Amtrak across the continental United States, from Boston to San Francisco, that he realized “so much of the real beauty of this country has been lost in that discussion.”

“It’s not just like the physical landscape,” he says. “It’s also the people.”

I am speaking to Hua because he has been nominated by his peers as the Harvard senior most likely to become President of the United States. As Hua tells me about his train trip across the country, I begin to understand why. Not just because his story about rediscovering America’s beauty is straight out of the Barack Obama Textbook of Unifying Campaign Speeches, but because despite that, it’s