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.”
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Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.