Trump's Goal: Finding A Nicname That Sticks to Her
The majority of Americans were dissatisfied with the 2 old men the major parties were offering them as 2024 choices for president. The Democratic Party heard the message loud and clear and, with as much respect as possible, pressured Biden to drop out of the race. The Republicans, tone deaf as always, plowed ahead with a vicious, senile felonious mob boss and cult figure. Now we’re in a space where polling from AP by NORC shows that 57% of Americans want Trump to drop out of the race, including 51% of Independents, 86% of Democrats and even 26% of Republicans, a survey that also shows that just 21% of American voters believe Trump, who tried— and failed— to paste the nickname Lyn’ Kamala on the new Democratic candidate, is honest. Almost 80% of Americans know Trump lies incessantly. It’s who he is.
So, while the Republicans struggle to find an anti-Harris message, Democrats have no such struggle in defining Trump. This morning, Jake Sherman, Melanie Zanona and John Bresnahan noticed that Republicans are so used to lazily and robotically running against Biden that they “seem to be struggling mightily with how to run against Vice President Kamala Harris… Consider just what’s gone on during the last couple days. [Widely disliked crackpot racist and neo-fascist extremist] Tim Burchett (R-TN) called Harris a “DEI hire,” a shocking remark that Democrats pushed back hard on. Burgess Owens (R-UT), one of just four Black House Republicans, then told us that Harris is ‘the greatest example of DEI. For those who believe in DEI, this is exactly what DEI is like. Kamala Harris.’ Glenn Grothman (R-WI) said on Sunday that Democrats ‘have to stick with her because of her ethnic background.’ We followed up with Grothman on this, who then informed us ‘I don’t think people view her as Black.’ Grothman added that people ‘just view her as someone who did nothing on the border.’… Trump seemed to try out some attack lines against Harris on Monday night, labeling her as “Lyin’ Kamala” while calling himself ‘a fine and brilliant young man named Donald J. Trump.’ At 78, Trump is more than 18 years older than Harris…
Biden had appointed Harris to deal with other countries— particularly Mexico, Colombia, Panama and the other countries of Central America to help the U.S. ease the border situation. The Republicans and their brain-dead stenographers in the corporate media claim he tapped her “to oversee the crisis at the southern border,” which is just a GOP talking point. “Harris and the whole Biden administration clearly failed there,” wrote Sherman, Zanona and Bresnahan for their Republican pals… “To that end, the House Republican leadership is moving headlong to the floor with an ‘emergency’ resolution ‘strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.’ This non-binding resolution carries no actual weight. Passing the measure this week certainly isn’t an emergency, even if the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border is a pressing issue. What they really want to do is bash Harris on the issue, and this resolution from GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik is the vehicle to do that.”
An NRSC campaign “memo” Monday said that Harris sometimes laughs at “inappropriate moments.” They also criticized her love of Venn diagrams. Yeah, OK.
The NRCC, the House GOP’s campaign arm, sent talking points to their members in competitive races warning of the challenges of trying to define a presidential candidate in roughly 100 days. This will be critical for not only the presidential race but also down-ballot contests.
“Republicans have never had less time to define the presidential nominee of our opponents,” the memo said, according to a copy obtained by Punchbowl News. “Because of that, it is vital that our entire Conference is on message and working together to present Kamala Harris as an extreme San Francisco progressive who is out of step with the American people.”
On Sunday afternoon, Kamala spoke to the staffers at the campaign headquarters in Delaware. If this is what Trump is going to have to contend with, it’s going to be a rough 100 or so days for the doddering old man. “Before I was elected vice president, before I was elected a United States senator, I was the elected Attorney General of California; before that I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on prepetraors 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. And in this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his. As a young prosecutor when I was in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office in California, I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse. Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse. As Attorney General of California, I took on one of our country’s largest for profit colleges and put it out of business. Donald Trump ran a for-profit college, Trump University, that was forced to pay $25 million to the students it scammed. As district attorney, to go after polluters, I created one of the first environmental justice units in our nation. Donald Trump stood in Mar-a-Lago and told Big Oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for a one billion dollar campaign contribution. During the foreclosure crisis, I took on the big Wall Street banks and won $20 billion for California families, holding those banks accountable for fraud. Donald Trump was just found guilt of 34 counts of fraud.”
“But no mistake, all that being said,” she continued, “this campaign is not just about ‘us vs Donald Trump; there is more to this campaign than that. This campaign has always been about two different versions of what we see as the future of our country, two different visions for the future of our country— one focussed on the future, the other focused on the past. Donald Trump wants to take our country backwards to a time before many of our fellow Americans had full freedoms and rights. We believe in a brighter future that makes room for all Americans. We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead. We believe in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty, where every person can buy a home, start a family and build wealth, and where every person has access to pay family leave and affordable child care. That’s the future we see. Together we fight to build a better a nation where every person has affordable healthcare, where every worker is paid fairly and where every senior can retire with dignity. All of this is to say, building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency, because we know when our middle class is strong, America is strong.”
And she took it right to him again: “We know that’s not the future Donald Trump is fighting for. He’d and his extreme Project 2025 will weaken the middle class and bring us backward, to the failed, trickle down policies that gave huge tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and made working families pay the cost; back to policies that put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, back to policies that treat health care as only a privilege for the wealthy instead of what we all know it should be, which is a right for every American. America has tried these economic policies before. They do not lead to prosperity. They lead to inequity and economic injustice. And we are not going back!”
That's what she needs to do-- define herself before Trump and his Republican media machine do, define the differences between her and Trump-- the crusading prosecutor vs the lifelong felon-- and define what she wants to accomplish for the American people.
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