Donald Trump, in his rambling, disjointed acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, claimed that President Joe Biden, his then-rival, was worse than “the ten worst presidents in the history of the United States” combined. His running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, in a rally in Virginia on the heels of Biden’s withdrawal from the race, dutifully upped the ante, insisting that, however bad Biden was, “Kamala Harris is a million times worse.”
I tried working this out on my calculator, but it began smoking and burst into flames.
We are entering a new political moment, one in which the vast collective meanness of pro-Trump Republicans will be brought to bear with searing intensity against Harris. She’s a Black, Asian woman who is married to a Jewish man. She stands a very good chance of being elected unless she is somehow reputationally destroyed. And for that reason, she will be the target of slander and vitriol on an unprecedented scale, in the post-truth environment that Trump has done so much to create.
GOP leaders have warned party members to refrain from attacking Harris based on her ethnicity or gender, since that would be, well, racist and sexist. But that dam is already overflowing, as Trump backers are pegging the former Senator, California attorney general, and local prosecutor as a “DEI hire,” a derisive reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Republicans will slam Harris on immigration and contend that she is soft on crime—that is, they will allege that she supports open borders in order to facilitate an influx of Democratic voters, and that she is aggressively pro-criminal. Subtlety is not in the GOP playbook.
There may also be legal challenges to Harris taking over the ticket. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a leading Trump brownnoser, has threatened to take legal action to block any attempt by Democrats to replace Biden as their nominee.
“It would be wrong, and I think unlawful, in accordance to some of these states’ rules, for a handful of people to go in a back room and switch it out because they don’t like the candidate any longer,” Johnson told ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “That’s not how this is supposed to work. So I think they would run into some legal impediments in at least a few of these jurisdictions.”
Marc Elias, an attorney specializing in elections, posted a response to Johnson’s ruminations on X: “First, you are an insurrectionist. Second, if your lawyers are telling you that they can prevent the DNC from nominating its candidate of choice, they are idiots.” Nonetheless, the absence of a sound legal basis did not stop Trump and company from launching dozens of court challenges, most of which failed, following his loss to Biden in November 2020.
“In a system governed by the rule of law, Johnson’s threats are empty,” wrote Ian Millhiser on Vox. But in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States granting the president broad immunity for official crimes he may wish to commit, all bets are off. “That decision had no more basis in law than a decision forcing Democrats to run Biden for president would have. So the possibility that a GOP-controlled Supreme Court will make up some reason to sabotage Democrats’ chances of holding the White House cannot be entirely ruled out.”
But the Republicans’ greatest focus in their efforts to defeat Harris will likely be the deliberate lies they tell about her.
Already, Trump’s supporters have dusted off the old theory that Harris is not eligible to be president—either because she is not a natural born U.S. citizen, which she is, having been born in California; or because her parents weren’t, which doesn’t matter. Nikki Haley was subjected to similar nonsense, which Trump promoted.
And they are already hurling accusations that the painfully open process through which Democrats convinced Biden to withdraw from the race was, in fact, a coup d’état.
“Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes,” proclaimed Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, on social media within hours of Biden’s announcement. “The coup is complete,” gushed Republican Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona.
Another Republican, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, posted on X that “the deep state and the elites in power” were behind all that just transpired. First, they lied about Biden being fit for office, then they started “a coup against him demanding he drop out of the race when they couldn’t hide it anymore.” Greene added, “The Biden's [sic] must have gotten the price they demanded for the presidential library that will pay the entire family for years to come.”
Some even compared Biden’s withdrawal from the race to the events of January 6, except that it was the real thing and not make-believe. “For anyone who still believes January 6 was a coup, take notes,” declared End Wokeness, a far-right troll account on X. “You just witnessed a real one. July 21st.”
Vance took up the coup claim in his first solo campaign appearance in Middleton, Iowa, alleging that “George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard.” He called this a “threat to democracy.”
Some commentators have tied Biden’s decision to drop out to the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump’s life.
“Now you all see why they tried to assassinate Donald Trump. This was all planned,” wrote far-right influencer Laura Loomer, moments after Biden announced his intent. In early July, Loomer offered this assessment of Harris on X: “She pretends to be black, she has a documented history of giving blowjobs to Willie Brown to climb the ladder, and she’s obsessed with killing babies.”
Harris has also long been the target of deepfake campaigns, including a doctored photo from 2021 that appears to show her posing with the late sexual predator and longtime Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein. It’s actually a photo of Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, with Epstein’s head superimposed on his.
There is also a fake video of Harris in which she nonsensically declares, in unmistakably Trumpian fashion: “Today is today. And yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow, so live today.” This clip was concocted from video footage taken at a 2023 rally on reproductive rights at Harris’s alma mater, Howard University.
As Rolling Stone reported, “MAGA propagandists” have sought to use “falsehoods, faked images, and innuendos” to falsely suggest Harris has had improper relationships with Sean “Diddy” Combs, the hip-hop artist who has been accused of multiple instances of sexual assault, and former talk-show host Montel Williams. There is no evidence of any ties between Harris and Combs; she and Williams briefly dated more than two decades ago, when both were single. “So what?” he asked in 2019.
Harris has also been the target of false claims that she vowed in advance of the 2020 election to exact retribution on Trump supporters, should she and Biden prevail: “Once Trump’s gone and we have regained our rightful place in the White House, look out if you supported him and endorsed his actions, because we’ll be coming for you next. You will feel the vengeance of a nation.” The quote is actually taken from a satirical article that appeared in 2019.
In an interview on NPR Monday, American Sunlight Project CEO Nina Jankowicz, who researches disinformation targeting women in politics, said a study conducted over a two-week period in 2020 “found over 336,000 pieces of abuse or disinformation targeting thirteen candidates across the political spectrum on a bunch of different social media platforms, and 78 percent of that was targeted at Kamala Harris.”
Asked by host Michel Martin about the source of these attacks, Jankowicz had this to say:
“I think some of the narratives—in particular, the narrative that she, quote-unquote, slept her way to the top—have been around as long as Kamala has been around. And that is, unfortunately, part of the criticism and abuse that women in public life frequently receive. Those narratives have been around for, you know, decades, and have morphed online and taken on new life of their own.”
Brace yourself: This is going to go from ugly to uglier.