It's A Core Value But GOP Leaders Prefer Not To Call It Racism Per Se— It Scares Suburban Voters

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan know how Señor Trumpanzee operates well enough and for long enough sos that they have no need to beat around the bush. But the title of their latest piece, Trump’s New Rival May Bring Out His Harshest Instincts skirts the words “racist” and “misogynist.” But those are precisely the “harshest instincts” they were describing. Trump is unhappy she’s already running a “‘prosecutor versus felon’ theme, highlighting her experience as a prosecutor and underscoring the fact that Trump has been indicted in multiple jurisdictions and convicted of 34 felonies. The prosecutor-versus-felon approach may appeal to undecided voters who had been sour on both Trump and President Biden. It may also goad Trump, who reacts strongly to criticism, into resurrecting the language he has used against other Black female prosecutors, such as Letitia James in New York and Fani Willis in Georgia, both of whom he has called ‘racist’ and attacked in personal terms.”

In a preview of what’s to come, Harris made the prosecutor’s attack line explicit during an appearance on Monday, describing her past as the district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California.

“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds: Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,’ she said.

Trump, for his part, has been trying to soften some of his harshest rhetoric about seeking vengeance on his rivals ahead of the general election. But over many years, he has turned off a sizable proportion of college-educated voters and suburban women with his rhetoric on gender and race — and the Harris candidacy introduces the risk of Mr. Trump lashing out at her and further alienating those voters.

Trump has a long history of attacking female rivals and critics in personal terms, usually describing them as mentally unstable or worse. He called Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, ‘that bitch’ in front of officials in his own administration while he was president, according to the book I Alone Can Fix It, by the Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. Trump’s use of the phrase was later confirmed to the New York Times.

In the case of Harris, the contempt is displayed both in public and private. Trump has told people that she “speaks in rhyme”— a mocking reference to her occasional word-salad sentences that have gone viral on social media, have become mainstays on Fox News and have been lampooned on liberal comedy shows.

Publicly, Trump has described her as “nasty,” “crazy” and “disrespectful,” mocked her laugh, mispronounced her name and promoted a false claim that Harris is constitutionally ineligible to serve as vice president, echoing his racist “birther” campaign against Barack Obama.

In a post on Truth Social on Monday afternoon, Trump accused the news media of trying “to turn ‘Dumb as a Rock’ Kamala Harris from a totally failed and insignificant Vice President into a future ‘Great’ President. No, it just doesn’t work that way!”

Harris is now garnering extensive media attention, and drowning out Trump. People close to him have acknowledged that such a circumstance usually prompts him to try to insert himself into the news cycle somehow, often in self-destructive ways.

…“You know, I want to see the first woman president also, but I don’t want to see a woman president get into that position the way she’d do it— and she’s not competent,” Trump said in August 2020.

A month later, he declared, “People don’t like her. Nobody likes her. She could never be the first woman president. She could never be. That would be an insult to our country.”

…The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the political arm for Senate Republicans, instructed its candidates on how to frame attacks on Harris, echoing the themes the Trump team has been using.

The Trump expanded orbit, including the main super PAC supporting him, has begun trying to portray her as part of a scheme to hide Biden’s frailties from the public, as well as pick at her record in California as a senator and prosecutor.

Unlike Haberman and Swan, Marc Caputo pulled no punches: Trump Camp Is Planning to ‘Willie Horton’ Kamala Harris, referring to the racist campaign strategy George HW Bush used against Michael Dukakis. “Trump’s campaign,” he wrote, “is preparing a a full-scale blitz on Vice President Kamala Harris, with broadsides on her record that borrow from the ad that came to define dog-whistle politics. The question is not just whether it will work, but whether Republicans— including the former president himself— will have the discipline to keep the racial subtext of their new strategy from becoming the text… Trump has not shied away from injecting race squarely into politics. A quick Google search will return a plethora of examples that have been roundly criticized: He helped spread the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, attacked the judge in the Trump University case as “Mexican,” and has consistently used epithets like ‘racist’ against black prosecutors and lawyers in his civil and criminal trials that he doesn’t use against white lawyers. As president, he reportedly distinguished between immigrants from Northern Europe and those from ‘shithole’ countries like Haiti and the countries of Africa. 

Given the former president’s inclinations, Trump confidants and advisers are bracing for the candidate to ratchet up the rhetoric beyond what the campaign had planned and move from defensible criticisms of Harris’s record into open racial animus.”

“Trump leads this campaign,” said one. “So we’re ready for him to call her a DEI hire by Biden, and we’ll see what we see when that happens.”

Race was already playing an important role in the Trump campaign prior to Biden dropping out. The former president picked JD Vance as his running mate in part to stem the hemorrhaging of support from white males Republicans suffered between 2016 and 2020. Vance’s first campaign ad in 2022 mocked critics for calling conservatives racists over restrictionist immigration policies.

While Trump advisers believe the racial issues that benefited the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 have abated, the election dynamics have taken on a new dimension with Harris— the first black woman vice president and the likely first black woman to run for president as a major party nominee— atop the ticket.

Finally Olivia Beavers and Jordain Carney used the word “race” in the headline: House GOP Leaders Urge Members: Stop Making Race Comments About Harris. “House Republican leaders,” they wrote, “told lawmakers to focus on criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ record without reference to her race and gender, following caustic remarks from some Republicans attacking her on the basis of identity. During a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning, chair of the House GOP campaign arm Richard Hudson (R-NC) and others issued the warning after a series of comments by their members that focused on Harris’ race as well as claims she is a ‘DEI’ pick, according to two people in the room… But several Republicans immediately took the criticism in a different direction. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) said Monday that Harris was a ‘DEI vice president’ and Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI)  over the weekend questioned if Democrats are sticking by her ‘because of her ethnic background.’ If nominated, Harris would be the first Black and South Asian woman to be a major party nominee.

Beavers and Carney noted that “The remarks about Harris’ race have privately infuriated some Republicans, who feel it shifts the spotlight back on the GOP instead of Democrats’ missteps. One House Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said Republicans who made comments about Harris being a DEI pick, which stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, needed to stop. ‘We have everything going our way and you just can’t handle that?’ this member added. ‘We’ll give you a cheat sheet if you don’t know what else to talk about.’”

This morning, Politico reported that “In the two days since Biden dropped out, Vote.org saw its highest levels of new voter registrations of the whole cycle: 38,500 people signed up, a 700 percent spike and higher even than when Taylor Swift made an Instagram post. Most were 34 and under.” Maybe the GOP hopes they are young Proud Boys and KKK members upset about DEI who are just getting around to registering so they can vote for JD Vance. But that would be a stretch.