Here Come The Attacks
Republicans are coming for Kamala Harris, and it’s getting ugly.
Now that the shock of the news that Kamala Harris is their new opponent in November has begun to wear off, Trump and the GOP are sharpening their knives and preparing their attacks upon her. Given what happened in 2016, it’s important to understand what they are planning and how we can collectively help blunt the assaults.
Trust me when I say they will be ugly and repeated often.
In fact, versions of these attacks have already begun. For example, more extreme members of the Republican conference immediately began to call Harris the “DEI” candidate, which stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion but may as well be the N-word.
The Trump Campaign intends to recycle other racist attacks used successfully in past campaigns, including their plan to “Willie Horton” Harris. But this “soft on crime” charge could backfire badly once voters remember who is the prosecutor and who is the convicted felon in this race.
They will also go after Harris as the so-called “Border Czar” responsible for the surge in migrant crossings. This is a title the press has irresponsibly, and without basis, picked up and run with. But as I’ll discuss below, such a position never existed and bears no relation to Harris’s actual role, which was focused on diplomatic efforts to curb migration.
There are also dangerous misinformation campaigns designed to slut shame Harris and impugn her character. These attacks so far are clumsy and may backfire because they tend to highlight the unhinged misogyny of the GOP, as personified by the presence of both Trump and JD Vance as the standard bearers of the Republican Party.
And finally, if you can believe it, the GOP (no doubt at Trump’s urging) is attempting to brand Harris as “Cacklin’ Kamala” and make an issue out of her open and joyful laugh. Harris laughs a lot, it’s true. But this particular attack will only sharpen the contrast between the two candidates—and in a way quite unfavorable to Trump.
Harris is no “DEI” candidate
For years, the right has been blasting the idea of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” and claiming that minorities holding pretty much anything but an agricultural or blue-collar job are unqualified and undeserving of the position. They have targeted DEI programs on campuses and in company HR policies and labeled them part of a concerted “woke” effort, all to push back on gains minorities have made in education and the workplace.
Some have taken this line of attack to absurd levels, claiming (without evidence) that DEI is responsible for everything from Boeing aircraft malfunctions to the container ship accident that crippled the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.
Now the DEI label has inevitably made its way into the presidential campaign, where right-wing radicals seek to portray Harris as unqualified, holding her position only because of “DEI.” For example, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY), a career trial attorney who is best known for bringing a lasso to a GOP vote apparently to wrangle a new speaker, declared in an interview that Harris was
“Intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel...I think she was a DEI hire.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), no paragon of intellectual or professional qualifications herself, posted a video of a Biden speech and tweeted,
“Joe Biden admits Kamala Harris is a DEI hire.”
Before running for Congress, Greene’s only claimed qualification for office was owning a CrossFit company.
In their worldview, no Black woman could possibly have earned the right to be the Democratic candidate. And yet Kamala Harris comes with an incredible resume of accomplishments and electoral victories, including two re-elections to office. She has been the San Francisco District Attorney, the California Attorney General, a U.S. Senator, and the Vice President of the United States.
To put it in context, we can simply look at Harris’s impressive track record of electoral victories over the past 21 years:
12/9/2003 San Francisco District Attorney 137,111 votes
11/6/2007 San Francisco District Attorney 114,561 votes
11/2/2010 California Attorney General 4,442,781 votes
11/4/2014 California Attorney General 4,102,649 votes
11/8/2016 U.S. Senator from California 7,542,753 votes
11/3/2020 U.S. Vice President 81,282,896 votes
By contrast, Donald Trump held no elective office before running for president and filed for bankruptcy six times before becoming a reality TV star. JD Vance has only been in elected office for less than two years, backed by his Silicon Valley benefactor, Peter Thiel. Nothing in their backgrounds suggests serious qualification of any kind for the jobs of President or Vice President of the United States.
So what makes Kamala Harris a “DEI” hire? On this point, we need to be quite clear: When you hear that term tossed around to describe a minority or a woman in a position of responsibility or authority, understand that it’s a racist, sexist and offensive term that implies they are somehow unqualified for the job. It’s also quite a tell, usually bandied about by the very people who themselves are entirely unqualified for their own jobs.
Even Republican leadership understands that throwing around terms like “DEI hire” isn’t good politics and has asked its conference to cut it out with attacks based on Harris’s gender or race. (They aren’t listening.) After all, Trump is trying to win over young ethnic minorities in key battleground states and white suburban women that he lost in 2020. Alienating them at this moment, with Harris surging in support, could prove fatal to those efforts.
Good luck painting Harris as soft on crime
If Harris suffered from anything during the 2020 primary, it was her ties to law enforcement. “Kamala is a cop” was a relatively bad message and hard to run on while cops were beating up George Floyd protestors.
It’s quite ironic that the Trump Campaign now wants to paint Harris as a liberal who is soft on crime. Their first attempts are already out there, and they are a kind of “Willie Horton 2.0.”
The Willie Horton question refers to former President George Bush Sr.’s racist dog whistle, accusing then-Governor of Massachusetts and Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis of being lenient on crime. Under Dukakis, a Black convict named Willie Horton, who was serving life in prison for murder, was furloughed for a weekend but did not return. He instead committed a further assault, robbery and rape. Bush’s television ad showed Horton’s face in a successful attempt to frighten America into voting against Dukakis, who somehow let this happen under his watch.
In place of Horton, Trump conjures bogeymen in the form of dangerous migrants, who Trumps claims (without evidence) cross our borders to commit thefts, rapes, and murders. This is a two-fer for Trump, who gets to blame Harris for the border crossing surge while scaring America over rampant migrant crime, which of course is counterfactual.
Under the Biden Administration, crime is sharply down across the U.S. from its 2020 pandemic highs, and immigrants consistently commit fewer crimes than the U.S.-born do, in large part because if caught they could be deported. As the New York Times reported, the much-touted “migrant crime wave” is wholly unsupported by data, despite high-profile cases the GOP likes to trot out.
Another Willie Horton-style example the Trump Campaign has latched on to is Jaleel Stallings. The campaign claims that Stallings was charged with the attempted murder of two police officers and that Harris raised money to bail him out. From this, they argue Harris is “radically liberal and dangerously incompetent.”
But here are the facts. As
of Popular.info noted,Stallings was found NOT GUILTY. He’s a military veteran who was shot at by police in an unmarked van.
And see the bruising on his face? The police beat him up while he was on the ground, defenseless.
An officer pled guilty to a felony and apologized to Stallings.
Legum then notes drily that it is the Trump War Room that is dangerously incompetent.
The fact is Harris is a seasoned prosecutor who also understands that the legal system contains inherent inequities that must be addressed. By continuing to attack her as a “liberal,” Trump could inadvertently shore up her support among progressives who were skeptical of her law enforcement background.
Trump is of course trying to peel away moderates and independents by suggesting Harris is soft on crime. But his delivery so far is clumsy, bizarrely highlighting in his speeches the fact that Harris is the prosecutor and he is the convicted felon. The Harris Campaign has already seized upon it perfectly:
And in her speech launching her presidential campaign, Harris leaned into her experience in law enforcement and made clear that she intended to hold Trump accountable:
I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.
Harris’s role in border policy was not as “czar” but as diplomat
I often hear, even from liberals, about how Harris has failed in her job as the “Border Czar.” This can be a frustrating conversation because it reminds me of how effective right-wing media has been in inventing narratives that the public accepts blindly.
First things first. There is, and never was, any position of “Border Czar.” That was something the Right came up with and the media then irresponsibly ran with, despite repeated attempts by the administration to correct the record.
Harris’s role was fundamentally a diplomatic one, seeking to get at the root causes of migration from Mexico and Central America. As reported at the time in 2021,
On March 24 the White House announced that Vice President Kamala Harris will lead U.S. efforts with Mexico and Central American governments to address migration. Her mandate will focus on diplomatic efforts both to “stem the flow” of migrants and to collaborate on efforts to ease the “root causes” underlying migration from the region. The vice president’s involvement “could help shift part of the conversation away from the media-centric idea that the sum total of this ‘crisis’ is what’s happening at the border, and focus it on the deeper causes of these migrations,” observed Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent.
How they get to “Border Czar” from this is by playing pure politics with an assist by a lazy media.
It’s time to push back on this narrative, and hard. Harris was successful in important ways in her diplomatic mission. Mexico cracked down on its own southern border, closing it to all non-essential travel. The Biden Administration voiced support for $4 billion in aid over four years to the “Northern Triangle” of countries where most migrants are departing from, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, with an emphasis on countering corruption.
Such diplomatic efforts and aid programs take time. In the meantime, we all know what happened. Democrats hammered out a very tough border bill with their Republican counterparts that would have been the most comprehensive legislation in decades to address immigration and border crossings. But that effort died when Trump killed it, unwilling to give Biden a political “win” during a campaign year.
In response, and contrary to progressive immigrant rights groups’ wishes, the White House issued an Executive Order limiting unauthorized crossings and asylum. Border crossings have now fallen to levels below the last month of the Trump administration.
Misogynistic disinformation will backfire if we call it out
I write this next section with a bit of dread and disgust. It is painful and horrifying to have to discuss some of the hateful, false claims flying around the internet about Harris. It recalls much of the bashing that Hillary Clinton was subject to in 2016, but feels even more disturbing and venomous this time around. To defeat the Republican threat, however, we need to understand the depths to which the Right has sunk and ready our responses.
A common and disgusting trope is that Harris somehow “slept” her way to the top and is a “slut” for having once dated people like Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco. On Wednesday, Fox Business guest commentator Alec Lace crudely remarked that Harris was the “original Hawk Tuah girl,” referring to a popular meme about oral sex techniques. “That’s the way she got where she is, and the party is going downhill if it’s in her hands,” Lace said. The female host, Dagen McDowell, quickly chided him. “That was harsh,” McDowell said. Lace was unapologetic, however, doubling down on X by asking his followers whether he went “too far” or was “right over the target.”
To aid in this smear campaign and suggest Harris is some kind of pervert, right-wingers altered an image of her husband to make it appear as though Harris was standing next to Jeffrey Epstein, reminding us that every accusation is a confession.
So how should Democrats respond? We can take a page from what Pete Buttigieg said after Rush Limbaugh claimed, with disgust in his voice, that America wasn’t ready to elect a gay man who kisses his husband onstage. Speaking about his marriage, to the cheers of the crowd, Buttigieg hit back that “it’s never involved me having to send hush money to a porn star after cheating on my spouse.” Buttigieg later added, “So they wanna debate family values? Let’s debate family values. I’m ready.” He made clear that he wasn’t “gonna take lectures on family values from the likes of Rush Limbaugh.”
Nor should Harris take any lectures from the likes of Trump or his campaign. If they want to make sexual morality an issue, they will open a debate that Trump simply will not win. Harris was not the one, for example, who had five children from three different marriages. Indeed, if she were, the press would consider it disqualifying. Harris is not the one who paid multiple lovers to keep quiet about affairs and was found liable by a jury for sexual assault. And Harris is not the one who took seven flights on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane and whose name is all over the Epstein case files.
That was all Trump. He is the only sexual pervert and rapist running for president.
Laugh away, Kamala
On a less serious note, it also appears that Trump is trying to make political hay out of Harris’s laugh. His instincts are partly man-baby in origin and partly fear-based and deeply personal.
When Harris made her first campaign stop in the suburbs outside of Milwaukee (great place to launch, by the way), the RNC, which is controlled by Trump, went after her for that laugh.
Kamala Harris brought her cackle to Milwaukee: “Good afternoon, Wisconsin! Ha ha ha ha!”
To us “normies,” as political strategist Rick Wilson likes to call “normal” voters, Harris’s laugh is natural, disarming, and infectious. But to the Right, it is something else entirely. Professor Matt Kavanagh provided a perfect commentary on this phenomenon:
I’m reminded of Margaret Atwood’s adage that a woman’s greatest fear is being killed by a man, and a man’s is being laughed at by a woman.
These guys see a woman laughing and don’t register pleasure or joy. They think a woman’s laughter is laughter AT THEM.
Indeed, to underscore this very point, Trump said the quiet part out loud, admitting, “They laughed at me. I hate when people laugh at me. I hate it. I hate it. It’s so disrespectful.”
Perhaps Harris’s laugh is exactly what we need in these times to respond to Trump. He is weird, he is horrible, and he deserves nothing but our derision and laughter.
So to conclude, I’ll leave you with this compilation, courtesy of The Lincoln Project:
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Ka-MALA: Make America Laugh Again.
Harris laughs. Trump doesn't. I like people who laugh.
As Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the other night on MSNBC, that women in politics know attacks like this are coming. POC in politics face the added burden of putting up with racist attacks as well.
I remember all the unsubtle attacks on Barack Obama for 'not being up to the job.' Trump and his white grievance party ALWAYS assume that any POC getting a job is 'unqualified' and an 'affirmative action hire.' The only difference is that they've replaced affirmative action with DEI. Both were the socially acceptable way of using the N-word.
Sen. Klobuchar's advice was simple: know which attacks to ignore, know which ones to respond to, and know which ones to make fun of.
So far, all we've seen from the Trump campaign and his flying monkeys is a bunch of fearful people showing their asses. The Harris campaign so far has shown a remarkable agility in responding, ignoring and, best of all, making fun of them.