Kamala Harris is breaking Republican brains

MAGA lacks issues against her, so it brings up the silly and the slimy

The MAGA crowd doesn’t like Kamala Harris because she’s a strong Democratic woman and candidate of African and Asian descent. 

Those aren’t good or valid reasons to oppose her, of course.

So Republicans invent other reasons – from ridiculously petty to demonstrably false to downright disgusting.

There’s a problem with her laugh. Or her smile. Or her shopping habits. Or her supposed lack of “qualifications” even though she’s been in public office for two decades, serving as San Francisco’s district attorney, California’s attorney general, a U.S. senator, and vice president.

Republicans take cheap shots because they don’t want to confront Harris on the real concerns of Americans. They’re especially afraid of Harris’ top issue, abortion rights, because it’s one of America’s top issues, too, and she’s on the same side as about two-thirds of voters. Rather than joust with Harris on the right of women to control their own bodies, the Trump campaign is focusing on another issue, declaring that Harris “wants to get rid of plastic straws.” 

Obviously, Harris frightens Team Trump. At age 59, she will make the 78-year-old Trump look like the very senior citizen that he is. She also has a sharp mind and a prosecutor’s ability to close in for the kill. 

As Harris begins her run for president, she seems to have broken Republicans’ brains but left their sexism and racism intact.

A button available at last week’s Republican National Convention said: “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go.” And the right claims she would be a “DEI president,” as if her impressive credentials mean nothing.

Trump and some other right-wingers purposely mispronounce Harris’ first name. They accuse her of “cackling” – or as radio host Ben Shapiro calls it, having an “insane Joker laugh.” They condemn her for smiling – or as former Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera put it, “over-smirking.”

Fox News even claimed she used a “fake French accent” when she pronounced the word “the” as “thee” instead of “thuh” during a visit to Paris. Fox also caught Harris red-handed committing the crime of buying nice cookware. 

Supposedly nonpartisan media have done their share of inane ambushing too. In 2020, CSPAN tweeted a video with an obviously false claim that Harris was ineligible to serve as vice president because her parents weren’t citizens when she was born in this country. Harris’ father was a Jamaican-born economist; her mother was an Indian-born cancer researcher. She was born in Oakland, California, so she’s an American citizen under the Constitution and eligible to run for president or vice president.

Asked about the claim against Harris, Trump did his familiar two-step of amplifying a lie and distancing himself at the same time: “I heard it today that she doesn't meet the requirements. … The lawyer that wrote that piece is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer. I have no idea if that's right.”

There was nothing to it, but CSPAN put it on social media, for some reason.

I wrote about some of these absurd and unfair attacks in a Stop the Presses newsletter in March, and it’s only gotten worse since then. Just last month, Tom Cotton tweeted: “Harris is – by far – the most unqualified, uninformed and incompetent vice president in history.” 

The “unqualified” part was particularly nonsensical since Harris has been in public office about twice as long as Cotton. Trump was far less qualified than Harris when he ran for president in 2016, and vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance is far less qualified now, having been in public office for only a year and a half.

Cotton at least cited a specific issue in his tweet, pointing to Harris’ role on border policy. Harris is an adviser on immigration, but she was never the “border czar,” as the right wing tries to paint her. In any case, let’s be grown-ups and acknowledge that a vice president has a limited ability to solve the immigration issue. Trump didn’t solve it when he was president. And the most significant recent effort to address the issue in a bipartisan manner was blocked by Republicans in Congress at Trump’s request because he wanted an issue to run on. 

Another lame swipe at Harris occurred in a tweet last October by Politico’s Jonathan Martin that was an example of MAGA puppetry of the press. Martin passed on a thought from “a smart Repub” that Harris was “a vp w scant experience on the world stage (to be charitable).” By that time, Harris had made four trips to Asia as vice president (including stops in Thailand, Philippines, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia and South Korea) as well as journeys to Guatemala, Mexico, France, Poland, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, Honduras and the Bahamas. She has also represented our country three times at the annual Munich Security Conference.

It’s clear that some insecure white men have a visceral reaction to powerful women of color. At a Conservative Political Action Conference meeting early this year, panelists speculated that Harris would compete for the Democratic presidential nomination against Michelle Obama, who has never expressed any interest in the job. The session was called “Cat Fight? Michelle vs. Kamala.”

Obviously, though, it’s the Republicans being catty.