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Trump/Republicans Resort to Racist, Anti-Woman Attacks on Harris

For decades Republicans and talking heads on Fox News and its imitators have resorted to racist, homophobic and misogynist attacks to incite the right wing base - now the MAGA base - of the Republican Party.  Through these efforts to fan hatred, division and prejudice, many, especially working class whites, have been duped time and time again into voting against their own economic interest as the GOP has pursued a reverse Robin Hood agenda of taking from the majority of citizens and giving to the extremely wealthy and large corporations. With Kamala Harris now the uncrowned Democrat presidential nominee, the standard GOP lies and ugliness are in overdrive as Donald Trump finds himself as the elderly, mentally declining presidential candidate in the election contest who has saddled himself with a VP running mate who is becoming a male Sarah Palin and alienating countless voters with his statements on unmarried women and families (the New Yorker has a great article) that do not conform to his imaginary image. A column in the Washington Post looks at the ugliness and nastiness of the Trump/Republican attacks on Harris to benefit the GOP's felon, sexual assaulter, Russian stooge  candidate:

Within hours of learning that Vice President Harris might lead the Democratic presidential ticket, Donald Trump called her “Dumb as a Rock.”

A few days earlier, former Trump adviser and radio host Sebastian Gorka referred to Harris as a “female Black diversity hire.” Kellyanne Conway, another former Trump adviser, said Harris “does not speak well. She does not work hard. She should not be the standard-bearer for the party.”

“The only reason she is in the White House,” said Fox News host and cheap-shot artist Jesse Watters, “is because of the DEI deal Biden cut with [Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)] to seal the nomination.”

And so it goes as the presidential campaign slogs toward Election Day. Efforts to marginalize Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, as an unqualified underachiever who got to where she is because of her skin color will never end. And that’s because the denigration of Black people as inferior lies at the heart of the belief in white supremacy that still infects some American souls.

The appetite of Harris’s right-wing detractors for racial derogation has a long history.

Think back to 1898, when Rep. John Sharp Williams (D-Miss.) said, “You could shipwreck 10,000 illiterate white Americans on a desert island, and in three weeks they would have a fairly good government, conceived and administered upon fairly democratic lines. You could shipwreck 10,000 negroes, every one of whom was a graduate of Harvard University, and in less than three years, they would have retrograded governmentally; half of the men would have been killed, and the other half would have two wives apiece.”

That turn-of-the-20th-century racism is with us today. Words can be weapons, too.

But Gorka is dead wrong. Harris is nobody’s “hire.” She was elected district attorney of San Francisco, elected attorney general of California, elected U.S. senator and elected vice president of the United States.

Harris earned those jobs the hard way. She put her vision, skills and judgment before the voters and let them decide. And, yes, like other achievers of a darker hue, Harris has had to overcome the odds and obstacles thrown in her way, such as Conway’s hoary slur that Harris is lazy and doesn’t know how to speak.

I submit that Harris spoke well enough, and worked hard enough, to successfully prosecute child sexual assault cases. She spoke well enough, and worked hard enough, to win massive settlements for people whose homes have been unfairly foreclosed on, and students and veterans who had been exploited by a profit-making education company.

The slander that people of Harris’s ancestry are lazier (per Conway), less intelligent (per Trump) and less devoted to country (“a radical California left winger,” as Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida called Harris) than others has a life of its own.

Why reprise the spirit of John Sharp Williams, why echo the malice of today’s political right? We elders have heard it all before. Some of us have also been on the receiving end. It’s not about us.

This is a heads-up to the energized and enthusiastic young voters who are being drawn to the Harris campaign in huge numbers.

You are going to see your candidate subjected to the most blistering, vile and specious personal attacks based on her race and gender. The effort, to be sure, is aimed at villainizing her with those who are undecided. But it’s also intended to tear her down in your eyes; to distract and demoralize you; to dampen the high spirits that are driving you toward the one goal that is above all this presidential election year — winning — which depends on voting. Let nothing stop you from getting to the polls. Because Election Day 2024 will decide who will govern and uphold democratic values.

Tellingly, Trump told a right wing :Christian" gathering that if they voted for him in 2024, they'd never need to vote again, once again showing his autocratic, anti-democracy goals.

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JD Vance: The Male Sarah Palin?

Over the last eight years JD Vance has shown that he has no guiding principles and that he will change supposedly deeply held convictions the blink of an eye if he thinks it will further his political interest.  He has gone from a never Trumper to Trump's VP nominee and in a little more than a week has shown that like Trump he will lie and posture in order to delight the misogynists, sexists and ignorance embracing MAGA base.  His pandering to that base has parallels with Sarah Palin, John McCain's VP pick who likely lost him the presidential election, in that while it thrills to base, it alienates even more voters than it pleases.  Vance's statements on abortion, which families count as real families (i.e. married straight couples with children), and women have sparked a fire storm and could well  help turn women against the Trump/Vance ticket.  And all of this doesn't even begin to factor in the manner in which his anti-Ukraine, pro-Putin statements are falling flat with those left in the Republican Party who support America's leading role in the world and are not ready to hand a large chunk of Europe over to Russia. His alienation of women, however, may his biggest gift to Democrats who already have Trump - who has bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, has been found guilty of sexual abuse, and contemptuous of women - as a big motivator for women to flee the GOP.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Vance's missteps:

Three years ago, well before JD Vance was selected as Donald Trump’s running mate, he suggested in a TV interview that some Democrats including Vice President Harris are “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable.”

Those 2021 comments are resurfacing on social media now that Harris is the likely Democratic nominee, sparking a fresh wave of anger from women who say it’s offensive to those struggling with fertility issues — and inaccurate that people without children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country’s future.

At the same time, many on social media are embracing and owning the “childless cat lady” label as a point of pride, with many even pointing to reported billionaire Taylor Swift as a prime example of a highly successful one — seen even on her 2023 Time “Person of the Year” cover with her fluffy ragdoll wrapped around her neck.

“There’s a movement,” declared Nikki Barnes, a previous member of the Democratic National Committee from Florida, accompanied by a “Childless cat ladies for Harris 2024” image quickly amassing nearly 2 million views. On TikTok, people are snapping up “Cat ladies for Harris 2024” stickers.

The vociferous response to the resurfaced Vance comments — which have been shared widely and amassed nearly 28 million views on an X post shared Monday — only underscores how female reproductive rights including access to abortion, birth control and in vitro fertilization will be a major drivers in the 2024 race. Gender and racial attacks like the ones she [Kamala Harris] experienced as a primary candidate in the 2020 race are poised to accelerate now that she’s the likely nominee.

For the record, Harris, 59, became a stepmom of two when she married Douglas Emhoff in 2014 and has been deeply involved in the lives of stepchildren Ella and Cole. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whom Vance also singled out in his comments describing how “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” became a parent of adopted twins.

[M]any women are reminding Vance that there are plenty of reasons they may not have children.

“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” actress Jennifer Aniston wrote Wednesday, slamming Vance in an Instagram story. “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day,” wrote the “Friends” star.

“I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.” (While Trump has declared support for in vitro fertilization, Senate Republicans last month blocked consideration of a bill to protect IVF access — and the issue erupted in February when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are people and that a person could be liable for destroying them.)

Reproductive health issues, especially conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis can impact women’s ability to conceive and carry a pregnancy. Female fertility declines with age and lack of adequate health-care services or child support services can also be factors influencing the decision to have a child.

‘The View" host Whoopi Goldberg also weighed in on the show Wednesday: “Sir, there are people who have chosen not to have children for whatever reason,” she said.

Meghan McCain, talk show host and daughter of the late GOP senator John McCain of Arizona, posted on X that “I have been trying to warn every conservative man I know — these JD comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends.”

Vance, in his 2021 comments, called out “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Women online blasted the assumption that those who are without children are unhappy.

Vance’s comments came as more Americans are choosing not to have children. A Pew Research Survey in 2021 found that the childless U.S. adults aged 18 to 49 who said they were unlikely to ever have children rose by 7 percentage points in the previous three years to 44 percent. About 56 percent said they did not want children, 19 percent stated a medical reason for not having kids, and financial reasons stopped another 17 percent from becoming a parent.

As some on social media put it: Childless cat ladies vote, too — and some, even, are cultural icons. “It’s bold, for someone seeking votes, to hone in on ‘childless cat ladies’ when the leader of Childless Cat Ladies is TAYLOR SWIFT,” author Caitlin Moran posted. . . . Sure enough, Swifties were entering the chat in droves.

Legal fellow and Lawfare correspondent Anna Bower pointed out on X: “hell hath no fury like a certain childless cat lady who has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.”

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The GOP's Continued Celebration of Ignaorance

It is almost laughable how Republicans - some dumb as bricks themselves - are attacking Kamala Harris as being dumb or a "DEI hire"  (the GOP's current substitute for the n-word) when the Republican Party now celebrates ignorance and attacks those with good academic degrees - or worse yet Ivy League degrees - as "elites" and the enemies of MAGA world.  The Republican Party that once valued education, science, and knowledge is dead and gone.  What makes the current GOP worship of ignorance even more farcical is the lengths that its own members with Ivy League degrees go in order to pretend they are good old boys and girls -think JD Vance - who has changed his name twice - Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz to name a few.   With an ever more competitive world and with rival nations fostering education of their population, the Republicans seemingly are in a race to dumb down the nation.  Then, of course, there is Trump who claims he is "smart" and a "stable genius" even as he speaks at an elementary school level.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the hypocrisy of this worship of ignorance:

Donald Trump loves to show off how smart he is. “I’m, like, a smart person,” he boasted on one occasion. “I went to an Ivy League college, I was a nice student,” he said on another. “I’m a very intelligent person.” And perhaps most memorably, “I’m a very stable genius.”

But the dopey language he chooses, along with his disheveled, unpresidented grammar — both intentional and inadvertent — belie those assertions. It’s impossible to forget that this is the same guy who spells little “liddle’,” capitalizes at random and blunders out the occasional “covfefe.”

Trump is shrewd enough to know that Americans don’t like a guy who acts smart. So if his fumbles are strategic, it’s not entirely dumb. On the left, people think emphasizing intellect and elite schools betrays unfair advantage in a multiple-intelligences, equitable-outcome world. On the right, your average MAGA Joe bristles at anyone who comes across as a coastal elite or too smart for his own good.

In its recent populist incarnation, Republicans downplay any whiff of intellectualism by avoiding big words in favor of Kid Rock fandom and trucker hat slogans. In MAGA world, glorified ignorance actually serves as a qualification for higher office (see: Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene), empowering more effective rage against “the liberal elite” and “the ruling class.”

This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position . . . . In order to stay in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers.

Remember, Ron DeSantis once eagerly joined one of Yale’s secret societies and told classmates he’d dreamed of attending Harvard Law. He founded a tutoring firm offering “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.”

But once in office, he made a show of distancing himself from his academic credentials.

His Ivy League brethren, Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law) and Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), take similar pains to wash off the taint of East Coast academia with good-ol’-boy cred.

This is in sharp contrast to the intellectual pretensions of earlier Republican leaders, who would highlight, say, the “historian” Newt Gingrich’s Ph.D.

The latest standard-bearer for regular-folk Republicans is a down-home J.D., now JD — no periods, dude — who went to Yale Law School only with the help of student loans and side jobs. What’s more, JD Vance first got a humbler degree at Ohio State through the G.I. Bill. At the Republican National Convention, Yale barely came up.

And in one of her very first moves as an aspiring second lady, Usha Vance, who attended Yale as both an undergrad and a law student, made clear she would like to be referred to as Mrs. Vance, rather than Ms. The implication being: dutiful wife first, fancy Ivy League lawyer second.

The Vance who emerged as a MAGA politician is one who, after reaping the benefits and connections of an elite graduate education, turned around and gave a speech in 2021 called “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

“How ridiculous is it that we tell our young people to go to college, to get brainwashed?” he asked the crowd, going on to quote Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.” For Vance, the biggest takeaway from his Ivy League education is the monumental chip on his shoulder.

Politicians have long achieved high office based on ambition, hubris, cunning and a certain degree of ruthlessness more so than on account of their intellect. Nor does an Ivy League degree equate with excellence.

But it’s nonetheless dispiriting to see a major political party give lowbrow boors pride of place over the high-minded. It also puts Republicans in an awkward position vis-à-vis their new national opponent. Should Republicans frame Kamala Harris as some kind of lightweight bungling her words and laughing her way weirdly to the Oval Office, it risks not only playing into racist and sexist stereotypes, it will also further cement the flagrant hypocrisy of their own party.

After all, the Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.

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Biden's Exit From Race Upends Republicans

The last few days have underscored the reality in politics that one should never discount  the possibility of events upending what one thought was a sure thing for campaigns and elections.  With Joe Biden's exit from the reelection race, Republicans' apparent plans to play on Biden's age and cognition as q sure election winner are turned upside down and suddenly Trump's age and failing cognitive abilities will be what is spotlighted. Moreover, with Harris now the likely Democrat standard bearer, less than enthused blacks and women seem to be taking a new interest in the election.  Then there's the surge in Democrat fundraising that has been nothing short of remarkable. The cultists are howling and all kinds of Republican hyperventilating and shrieking is on open display.  Mike Pence who hailed Biden's "right decision" is under attack and the GOP's misogyny is in overdrive as Harris is attacked as a "DEI hire" and Trump resorts to lies and insults.  In short, Republicans don't like the "prosecutor versus the felon" meme and realize that Trump's constant verbal diarrhea and incoherence will be under renewed scrutiny by the media and voters.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at Republican hysteria:

Republicans I spoke with today, some of them still hungover from celebrating what felt to many like a victory-night celebration in Milwaukee, registered shock at the news of Biden’s departure. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaign—one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden—against a new and unknown challenger. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race,” a clearly peeved Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “Now we have to start all over again.”

For months, in talking with Wiles and LaCivita, I was struck by their concern about the potential of a dramatic switch—Democratic leaders pushing out Biden in favor of a younger nominee. They told me that Trump’s campaign was readying contingency plans and studying the weaknesses of would-be alternatives, beginning with Vice President Kamala Harris. By the time of the debate, however, they believed that Democrats’ window had all but closed. . . . . More than anything, Trump’s allies believed that the president’s stubborn Irish ego wouldn’t let him back out of a fight with a man he despised.

But they couldn’t take any chances. Two weeks ago, according to a campaign source who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio went into the field to begin testing the outcomes of a Harris-versus-Trump matchup. These surveys, conducted across several battleground states, represented the most concrete step taken to prepare for the possibility of a new adversary. Still, with the polling a tightly held secret—I couldn’t verify the results—there were no outward signs of Trump’s operation expecting a reset. When convention speakers reached out to the GOP nominee’s campaign, gauging whether to hedge their speeches with attacks on Harris, they were told to keep the focus on Biden.

In many ways, the convention scene was one of a party peaking too early. Campaigns are marathons measured by changes in momentum and narrative, and Republicans in Milwaukee reveled in what felt like a three-week winning streak, dating back to the debate, in which the daily churn of insider gossip focused ever more on Democratic fatalism and Trump’s seeming inevitability.

The president’s abrupt exit dashed any such fantasy. Suddenly, Republicans who had boasted last week about expanding the electoral map—pushing into Minnesota and Virginia and other decidedly blue areas—were fretting about the possibility of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly joining the Democratic ticket, partnering with Harris to put back into play key battlegrounds that just 24 hours earlier seemed to be out of reach.

[T]he essence of what Trump’s campaign believes—that any Democrat who picks up the party’s banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable. Republicans will point to historic inflation, millions of illegal border crossings, and geopolitical chaos from Eastern Europe to the Middle East as evidence that the entire Democratic Party has failed the American people.

It’s true that Harris will struggle to shed some policy-related criticisms; her appointment early in her vice presidency to handle the southern border, in fact, could make her even more vulnerable to immigration-related attacks than Biden was. It’s also true, however, that policy criticisms aren’t what made Biden unelectable in the eyes of most Americans. In an evenly divided and exceedingly polarized nation, Biden lost ground—with his party’s base as well as with independents—because he was perceived to be too old and infirm to serve another four years in office.

Harris is neither of those things. At 59 years old, she is two decades younger than Trump and will have no trouble keeping up with him on the campaign trail or the debate stage. She is also a former prosecutor who, if anything, is known for being too tough on crime.

At the very least, Trump’s lieutenants realize, Harris’s promotion will provide a desperately needed jolt to Democrats nationwide in the form of fundraising, volunteerism, and enthusiasm. Whatever her flaws as a politician—Harris ran a dreadful primary campaign for president in 2020, marked by organizational infighting and awkward sound bites—she does not possess the one flaw that proved insurmountable for Biden.

Trump’s campaign insists that nothing has changed. . . . But they know it’s more than that. They know that from the moment they partnered with Trump, everything they intended for this campaign—the messaging, the advertising, the microtargeting, the ground game, the mail pieces, the digital engagement, the social-media maneuvers—was designed to defeat Joe Biden. Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.

[F]or a campaign that went to bed Saturday believing it would dictate the terms of the election every day until November 5, Sunday brought an unfamiliar feeling of powerlessness. For the first time in a long time, Trump does not control the narrative of 2024.

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JD Vance And Republican Anti-Abortion Extremism

I am not pro-unrestricted abortion per se, but I do believe women have a right over control of their own bodies and believe Roe v. Wade had set a reasonable time frame and that there must be exceptions for instances of rape, incest and where a mother's health or life is threatened not merely when a mother is on death's door.  These views are anathema to many in the Republican Party and most certainly among Christofascists who see total abortion bans as a first step in rolling back LGBT rights - most want the sodomy laws brought back and same sex marriage eliminated - and eliminating the right to contraception.  For them forced births are the goal and gays must be made invisible second class citizens or worse.  While Donald Trump is lying and dancing in circles trying to hide what a second Trump regime would mean for abortion rights, as a column in the Washington Post by a former Republican, Trump's selection of JD Vance as his running mate gives a clear glimpse of what would actually happen. Rather than the ongoing infighting, Democrats and the feckless media need to put a spotlight on GOP anti-abortion extremism and take that message to swing states where abortion bans are opposed by voters notwithstanding the efforts of Republican legislators to enact bans.  Here are column highlights:

Republicans have a problem: Their base insists on a nationwide forced-birth law, but political realists in the party understand this is a hugely unpopular position, and one that might lead to electoral disaster. The tactical solution: Hide their abortion extremism while winking to the base.

“The new Republican platform still includes language that links abortion to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, leaving open a path to legislation or court decisions that would grant fetuses additional legal rights.” That said, “the 16-page document nevertheless infuriated some antiabortion advocates within the party, who view the watered-down language as a faithless betrayal of a core part of the GOP base.” Former president and current Republican candidate Donald Trump now claims he is content to leave the matter to the states.

But when Trump named Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate, any pretense of abortion moderation went out the window. Few voters think Republicans might moderate their stance with someone on the ticket who wants to ban abortion without exceptions for rape or incest.

It is inconceivable that Trump would refuse to sign a nationwide prohibition on abortion if it landed on his desk. He owes his political career in large part to the devotion of White evangelicals, for whom abortion under any circumstances is anathema. He brags that his Supreme Court picks reversed Roe v. Wade. Just as Trump’s denial of any knowledge of Project 2025 (drafted by over 140 of his former aides and championed by the Heritage Foundation, a sponsor of the Republican convention) is not fooling anyone, neither should the platform mislead voters. This remains an extremist party when it comes to abortion.

The selection of Vance clarified the party’s absolutism. . . . Trump picked him because of — not in spite of — his anti-abortion bona fides. … Vance has worked in lockstep with extremist Republicans in the Senate to undermine reproductive freedom — refusing to back down from the dangerous abortion bans and restrictions his party has engineered.” . . . which includes favoring an abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest and opposition to a bill protecting IVF.

Trump, opportunistically, has been all over the map when it comes to abortion: He has swung from a pro-choice Democrat, to a rigid antiabortion Republican who once insisted women should be “punished” for abortions, to someone who said he would consider limits on contraception, to someone denying he suggested any such thing. However, with an ideologue such as Vance at his side, abortion-ban advocates can be reassured that Trump will not stray from their orthodoxy.

Vance, as he has on all his views, immediately tried to fall in line behind Trump. . . . No one who has seen Vance twist himself into a pretzel for a candidate he once analogized to Hitler will be surprised by this transparent maneuvering.

In a Biden-Harris campaign press call after Vance was named, the campaign spokespeople’s focus on his radical abortion position was noteworthy. “He supports a nationwide ban on abortion, criticizes exceptions for rape and incest survivors, actually saying ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ [and] calling those circumstances ‘inconvenient,’” said reproductive rights advocate Amanda Zurawski.

“When Donald Trump and J.D. Vance celebrate overturning Roe, they’re celebrating every single cruel abortion ban across the country, many of which have no exceptions for rape or incest,” Timmaraju said. “And, at the end of the day, we always knew Trump would pick someone just as committed to taking away reproductive freedom. But now that it’s official, it couldn’t be more clear.”

Lauren Beene, a general pediatrician who helped organize the ballot measure Issue One to protect abortion rights, weighed in as well. “J.D. Vance called our victory ‘a gut punch,’” she said. “A 10-year-old rape victim couldn’t receive an abortion in her state, but somehow that gut punch was us voting to restore access to reproductive health care?” She added, “Well, that gut punch proved to America that voters will not stand by as MAGA Republicans threaten our rights and freedoms.”

If the Biden-Harris team is going to turn the race around and make progress in swing states (where polling continues to freak out Democratic members of Congress, donors and activists), abortion must be a top issue.

Certainly, the Biden campaign will launch an array of charges against Vance: his cringeworthy lack of experience, his anti-Ukraine rhetoric, his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, his vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill and his praise for Project 2025. But none is more potent than abortion because no issue is more harmful to Republicans. And none offers Democrats a greater hope of breaking through to critical swing-state voters.

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