The Trump campaign’s response to former Vice President Joe Biden’s choice of Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate looked almost consistent for about a minute before dissolving into a hot mess of insults unified mostly by their racism and misogyny.
The Trump campaign would like to have it both ways, attacking Harris both for her record as a prosecutor and as wanting to “appease the anti-police extremists controlling the Democratic Party,” and Trump’s base is certain to tightly embrace that argument. But that specific argument about Harris’ relationship to criminal justice hangs more generally on a picture of her as inherently untrustworthy. “Phony,” the campaign said right out of the gate, only to run into the fact that Donald Trump himself didn't seem to know that was the message, and preferred the even less substantive and more overtly misogynistic “nasty” and racist “disrespectful.”
Some on Team Trump joined in with that crude misogyny, from Eric Trump favoriting a tweet calling Harris a “whorendous pick” (the tweet was later deleted) to campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis tweeting, “Kamala sounds like Marge Simpson.” An official campaign email called her “the meanest, most horrible, most disrespectful, MOST LIBERAL of anyone in the U.S. Senate.” Disrespect being a key move there, and one Trump had also used in whining about Harris’ tough questioning of Brett Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings. They pretty much might as well call her uppity. We can all tell that’s what they mean.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson went hard on the untrustworthy angle, saying there were “time-share salesmen you could trust more” and “payday lenders who are more sincere,” but in case anyone doubted that he was leaning on centuries of depictions of women and people of color as untrustworthy, he also angrily defended his right to intentionally mispronounce Harris’ name.
Other Republicans swiftly moved to questioning Harris' racial background in a transparent (and transparently racist) effort to undermine her standing with Black voters. Fresh off of defending Trump’s pronunciation of Thailand as “Thighland,” Republican commentator Dinesh D’Souza argued that Harris couldn’t count as truly Black because her ancestry included a white slave-owner. If having that ancestry meant a person wasn’t Black, the U.S. Black population would immediately and precipitously drop.
And Trump chose this moment to make a racist appeal to “the suburban housewife” fearful of Black people moving into her neighborhood. No mention of Harris, but not a tough code to crack.
The details of the attacks on Harris are completely incoherent and often internally contradictory. But there is an underlying logic: As a Black woman, Harris can’t be trusted. For Trump’s base and more people beyond it than we might like to believe, the specifics don't need to make sense as long as they play into this. And the specifics sure aren’t going to make sense. But the ugliness will speak for itself.