MAGA Republicans are subjecting Vice President Kamala Harris to a barrage of racist and sexist attacks as she has stormed out in front as the likely 2024 nominee in the wake of Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race.
In just the past 48 hours, Harris has been targeted by resurgent “birthers” who claim she’s not a natural-born citizen and by Trumpy Bible-thumpers who claim she’s a biblical “Jezebel” — a reference to a temptress who misled the faithful into idolatry and sexual depravity. GOP Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee said that “100 percent, she was a DEI hire” insisting of Biden’s choice of Harris: “When you go down that route, you get mediocrity.”
The attacks from the far right are as predictable as they are distasteful — reflecting a “based” far-right culture that sees unvarnished expressions of bigotry as a virtue. The attacks center on Harris’ race and gender, and frequently include the claim, as Burchett did, that she is a “DEI” candidate. While technically shorthand for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” DEI has taken on the function of a coded slur that right wingers can now hurl at minorities. (As the journalist Eric Kleefeld puts it: “DEI is pronounced with a hard-R sound.”) While primarily wielded against people of color, it’s also used to attack women and LGBTQ Americans.
Republicans began tripping over themselves to promote racist tropes about Harris as soon as Biden withdrew.
Trump White House veteran Kellyanne Connway blasted Harris on Fox News as lazy (“doesn’t work hard”) and inarticulate (“she does not speak well”). Wyoming GOP Rep. Harriet Hageman claimed Harris is “intellectually … the bottom of the barrel,” while also insisting she was chosen for vice president as a “DEI hire.” Other Republicans have claimed Democrats would rather rally around another standard bearer, but are supposedly saddled with Harris out of demographic obligation: “A lot of Democrats feel they have to stick with her,” said Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), “because of her ethnic background.”
In truth, the attacks on Harris began soon after Biden’s debate faceplant jump-started public debate about his fitness for reelection. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration deputy who remains a star in the MAGA orbit, went back to the 1950s with his appraisal of Harris, referring to her with a word that would have been posted on segregated facilities in the Deep South: “She’s a DEI hire, right? She’s a woman. She’s colored. Therefore, she’s got to be good.”
Other attacks have centered on the vice president’s sexuality, with some on the right picking over Harris’ well-documented romantic relationship in the mid-1990s with Willie Brown, the far-older, larger-than-life California machine politician, or the fact that she once dated the famous talk-show host Montel Williams.
Jackson Lahmeyer, the head of Pastors for Trump and a former GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma posted on July 3 on X that “Both Joe + the Ho gotta go.” He responded to critics of his sexist attack with rejoinders like: “The biblical term is whore if you feel safer with that word,” adding that “harlot is also another option haha.”
The Murdoch-owned New York Post dressed up its DEI broadside at Harris in the form of a business column. The author of the book Go Woke, Go Broke, Charles Gasparinio, wrote under the screamer headline: “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris.”
Gasparino, whose bio reportedly used to falsely claim that he was a Pulitzer nominee, also took aim at the VP’s intelligence. He called Harris — the Howard University and U.C. Hastings Law graduate, former San Francisco DA, former California attorney general, former U.S. senator, and current vice president — “the most irrepressibly fatuous politician in America,” and claimed her rise to the nomination would only come because the “Democratic Party is unable to break its DEI stranglehold.”
More recently, Lance Wallnau — a Christian nationalist who is tight with the MAGA movement — jumbled up both race and sexuality to blast Harris for embodying “the spirit of Jezebel” — a jab that members of the religious right have long used against female Democratic politicians. But Wallnau warned that Harris will be “even more ominous than Hillary” Clinton, because, he said: “she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.” For his part, Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance is laughing off — or perhaps laughing at — what he paints as Democratic oversensitivity to the bigoted behavior of the right.
“Democrats say it’s racist to believe … well they say it’s racist to do anything,” Vance said at a rally in his hometown suburb of Middletown, Ohio, on Monday. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and one today. I’m sure they’re gonna call that racist too.”
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”