Do MAGA Republicans Listen to Themselves?
Earlier this month, while speculating on Newsmax about how Vice President Kamala Harris might perform as a Democratic presidential nominee, the ever-noxious Donald Trump supporter Sebastian Gorka dismissed her in the most offensive way, using the shorthand for “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs.
“She was hired by DEI, right? She’s a woman. She’s black,” he said, adding sarcastically, “So she has to be good.”
The 20-year-old chairwoman of the Young Republicans of Hawaii joined the debate, suggesting on Instagram that Harris would be more effective in the White House. kitchen “I can understand that some might consider my words misogynistic or sexist, but it is simply a joke,” Rocklin Youngstrom explained, perhaps unaware that her post could be all three without being funny.
“Low IQ Kamala” is how the “official Trump 2024 campaign war room account” described Harris on social media platform X.
And Trump rallies have long featured merchandise bearing the slogan “Joe and Ho have got to go.”
I assume this display of super-posh behavior is what prompted Republican leaders to warn Republican members of Congress to refrain from making “overtly racist and sexist attacks” against Harris.
“This election is going to be about policies and not personalities,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after a closed-door meeting with House Republicans on Tuesday. “This is not personal when it comes to Kamala Harris, and her ethnicity or her gender has nothing to do with this at all.”
Now, I'm just suggesting something, but if you have to order your political allies to avoid sexist and racist rhetoric against the first woman of color to lead a major presidential ticket, doesn't your party have a sexism and racism problem?
And if you are urging them to abjure only open attacks, does that mean you're okay with more nuanced attacks? openly Is it sexist or racist when Trump calls Harris “a nasty woman,” a “radical left-wing lunatic,” and “dumb as a rock”? Or when he constantly butchers her given name (which is correctly pronounced “comma-la”) and claims she “shouldn’t even be allowed to run”?
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, must not have gotten Johnson’s memo. Last week, he evoked the despicable Reagan-era caricature of the black welfare queen to describe Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general and U.S. senator.
“What the hell have you done besides collect a government check for the last 20 years?” she asked the vice president during his first solo campaign rally.
Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told Fox News that Harris “doesn’t speak well. She doesn’t work hard.”
It's been fun to watch Vance's gaffes in his first few appearances as Trump's vice presidential nominee, leading to speculation that Trump must be having a serious case of buyer's remorse.
The Internet caught fire after Hillary Clinton resurfaced with a 2021 clip Vance telling Tucker Carlson that Democrats like Harris and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are “a bunch of childless, cat-loving women who are miserable with their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” By contrast, he said, those who fit his narrow definition of parents “who come home at night and see the face of a smiling child, whatever their profession, I think are happier, I think they’re healthier and I think they’re going to be better prepared to really lead this country.”
It takes a special kind of ignorance to simultaneously criticize women who don't have children. and Cat lovers. Vance’s bizarre fetishization of fatherhood — he has suggested that fathers should have more votes than people who don’t have children — is already backfiring. Once his cat-loving comments came to light, a Time magazine “Person of the Year 2023” cover featuring childless Taylor Swift with her cat Benjamin Button around her neck went viral. One of Harris’s two stepsons and her mother also criticized Vance’s inaccurate attack on the vice president.
Even Jennifer Aniston, who doesn’t have children and only dabbles in politics occasionally, weighed in on Instagram on Wednesday. “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential Vice President of the United States,” she wrote. Alluding to Vance’s vote against granting access to in vitro fertilization, she added: “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is lucky enough to have children of her own one day. I hope she doesn’t have to resort to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her too.”
Democratic campaign consultant Tim Hogan recently described the Trump-Vance campaign on CNN as “a testosterone-fueled formula that I think is going to blow up the gender gap in this election.”
It's too early for polls to determine whether that's true. Harris's flawless debut as the likely Democratic nominee is sure to lead to the occasional misstep. That's how campaigns work.
And the torrent of racism and sexism that has already poured out of Trump and his supporters will surely continue to wash over us between now and Election Day. We can at least be thankful that the campaign has only 100 days left.
