Gee, who'd figure that a woman of color on the presidential ticket against Donald Trump would make him lose his sexist, racist mind? The good news is, the Associated Press is reporting it as such: "[T]he racism and sexism underlying Trump's critique of the first Black woman and person of Asian descent on a major party ticket are part of an aggressive strategy to appeal to white suburban voters."
That wasn't so hard, was it. Although calling it "strategy" might be a bit of a reach. It's really Trump's personal misogyny and racism that's behind the attacks on Harris. He says "nobody likes" her and her serving as the first female president would be "an insult to our country." He also refuses to pronounce her name correctly. That's not strategy. That's Trump being a hateful motherfucker.
Or if you're a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics and its director of research like Kelly Dittmar, you say it more politely. "It's hard to see that as not somehow tied to what you view as 'our country.'" But this time around, it's at least being called out for what it is. The AP again: "'You know who's further left than Crazy Bernie? Kamala. Kamala. Kamala,' Trump said, mispronouncing and stretching out each syllable of her name each time he said it in North Carolina."
She's not, and that's part of Trump's flailing. He doesn't know how to land an effective attack on Biden, another old white guy. Attacking Harris is totally in his wheelhouse. Which AP also recalls: "The repeated mispronunciation of Harris' first name, which several Trump allies have mimicked, seemed deliberately racist and akin to the president's former habit of referring to his predecessor as 'Barack Hussein Obama' and recalling Trump's false claim that Obama was ineligible to serve office."
Trump's team even tried to float a Harris version of birtherism, an fringe legal argument that she's not eligible for the office because she's not even entitled to birthright citizenship. That was put forward in an op-ed by a whack job law professor, John Eastman, and pushed by a Trump campaign legal adviser. But that has gained absolutely no traction in the month that it's been floating out there, so Trump has to go back to his tried and true. She's "angry," he says. Her questioning of Brett Kavanaugh in his Supreme Court hearings was "nasty."
It worked against Hillary Clinton, but this time around at least the traditional media is willing to call him out for it and call it what it is. Let's just hope there aren't any emails in Harris's past they can latch onto.
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