He called her Kamala the Laughter and Kamala the Liar. Kamala the Crazy and Kamala the Comrade.
He has described the vice president as lazy, stupid and anti-Semitic (although her husband is Jewish, so perhaps Donald Trump should add that she is a masochist, too).
Since Kamala Harris became his opponent, a visibly bewildered Trump has had to grapple with how to compete against a Democrat who does not share his gender, skin tone or social status.
In his test marketing campaign, he has focused on one line of attack that is particularly notable, not because it didn’t come out of the woodwork, but because it’s such a facile and misleading argument: Why, Trump asks, has Harris not already accomplished everything she’s promising on the campaign trail?
“She says she’s going to lower food and housing costs on day one,” he said at a recent rally in key swing state Pennsylvania. “But Kamala’s day one was three and a half years ago. Why didn’t she do it then?”
This is why: because she is serving as vice president of these United States.
Go ahead and criticize the Biden administration and attack its record. Call it, if you want, the worst and most incompetent in the entire history of mankind.
But let's not pretend that Harris is the one in charge.
As vice president, “you’re in the room, but you’re not the one making the decisions,” said Joel Goldstein, a law professor emeritus at St. Louis University who has written two books on the vice presidency. “You have a voice, but ultimately there’s one vote that counts, and you don’t have it.”
If the question is, 'Why didn't he do it? ', Goldstein continued, 'the answer is, 'It wasn't his administration. '”
The vice presidency has often served as the punchline of a long-repeated joke, that is, when the office and its occupant have received some attention. In the corpus of our political system, a vice president is like an appendage: he does some good, but one could easily live without him.
John Adams—the first to hold the office during Washington’s presidency—once called the vice presidency “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man devised or his imagination conceived.”
Walter Mondale, who served as President Carter’s deputy, described the vice presidency as “an awkward office.” It sits between two branches of government, the executive and the legislative, with the vice president serving as the tiebreaker in the Senate. (Last December, Harris set a record by casting the most tie-breaking votes in history.)
“For most of its history,” Mondale noted, “neither branch wanted to see” the vice president.
But the nature of the job changed radically under Mondale, who struck a deal with Carter to have it function as more than just a potted plant. Mondale became the first vice president to have a White House office, met regularly with the president and carved out a significant advisory role in the Carter administration — a precedent that has been followed in Washington ever since.
One thing that has not changed, however, is the inherently subordinate nature of the vice presidency.
“He’s taking on a role where, by definition, he’s not supposed to be a leader,” said Christopher Devine, an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton and author of books on vice presidential candidates. “He’s supposed to step back and act in the shadow of the president.”
That created a huge gap in expectations for Harris — who made history as the first Black and Asian American vice president of the United States — which, in turn, raised many questions about what happened to her as she settled into semi-anonymity and the usual role of deferring to the president and carrying out his vision.
It was only a few weeks ago that Harris began to fully emerge in her own right, after President Biden stepped aside and the vice president took over as the Democratic nominee to replace him.
Since then, polls suggest that most voters have little idea what exactly Harris has been up to these past three and a half years — which, politically, is one of those good and bad things.
Blueprint, a Democratic polling and research organization, said a recent survey found that “the general public doesn’t give Harris credit for many of the Biden administration’s popular policies, but she also won’t have to carry the president’s baggage on issues like inflation.”
In a Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos poll, nearly 6 in 10 respondents said they believe Harris had “only some” or “very little” influence on the administration’s immigration policies, and more than 6 in 10 said she had limited influence on Biden’s economic policies.
(Both polls were completed before last week’s Democratic National Convention, which spent four days praising Harris for Biden’s successes and ignoring the administration’s failures.)
There are legitimate questions about the advice Harris has given the president, which speaks to the judgment she would exercise in the Oval Office. Harris said, for example, that she was “the last person in the room” before Biden began the deadly and chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. (Trump, of course, can’t help but exaggerate, claiming that the vice president had “the final vote … the final say” on the matter.)
It is not yet clear what kind of advice Harris has offered Biden or to what extent the president has heeded it.
“It’s always confidential, always behind closed doors,” Goldstein said. “The vice president can’t say, ‘The president was about to make a mistake and I told him not to and the sun came up the next day.’”
If only.
What can be said is that it is absurd to suggest that Harris wielded power to curb inflation, secure the border, solve the nation's housing shortage and resolve the myriad other problems Trump blames her for.
There's a reason President Truman kept a sign on his desk (and not the vice president's) that read “The Responsibility Lies Here.”
Trump surely appreciates that pecking order, even if the alpha-obsessed former president doesn't let on.
