By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
In a solemn Oval Office address Wednesday night, President Joe Biden explained his reasons for ending his reelection bid and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him. The speech capped a historic two weeks, with Harris catapulted to the likely nomination after Biden’s surprise announcement on Sunday.
On the Republican side, after Donald Trump survived a July 13th assassination attempt, he pledged to unite the country. At least, that’s how he began his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. But halfway through his meandering address, the longest in political convention history, Trump was back to his old self, claiming the 2020 election was stolen, attacking migrants, and invoking the “China virus.”
Now, the Trump/Vance campaign is in seeming disarray as they shift their strategy from defeating 81-year-old Joe Biden, to beating Kamala Harris, a dynamic woman of color in her prime. Trump, 78, is now the oldest candidate for president in U.S. history. He, Vance and their surrogates have a tried and true racist and sexist playbook to fall back on.
At least three Republican members of Congress have referred to Harris as a “DEI hire,” referring to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion considerations.
In his Southern drawl, Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett told CNN’s Manu Raju, “Biden said, first off, he said he’s going to hire a Black female for Vice President…When you go down that route you take mediocrity and that’s what they have right now as Vice President…100%, she was a DEI hire.”
Wyoming Republican Harriet Hageman, who beat Liz Cheney after she supported Trump’s impeachment, described Harris in an interview as “Intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel…a DEI hire.”
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson desperately attempted damage control, as a central Republican strategy has been to expand the party’s recruitment of people of color. Johnson said in a news conference that Harris’s “ethnicity or her gender have nothing to do with this whatsoever.”
This week, a 2021 Fox News video has gone viral. In it, J.D. Vance’s sexism and homophobia are on full display:
“We’re effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via the corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. It’s just a basic fact. You have Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”
Donald Trump promised he’s “not going to be nice” at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night, and has called Kamala Harris “dumb” in an interview and “Dumb as a Rock” on social media. He also refuses to pronounce her name correctly, stressing the second syllable, a practice mimicked by his followers across the rightwing media. The correct pronunciation is “Comma-Lah,” stressing the first syllable.
Harris showed no signs of being intimidated by Trump, when she visited the Biden/Harris campaign headquarters in Delaware on Monday:
“I was the elected Attorney General of California, and before that I was a courtroom prosecutor. 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.”
Kamala Harris is not the first Black woman to challenge Donald Trump. During his tenure in the White House, he assailed California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, calling her “low IQ.” Trump regularly insulted New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who won the case she brought against the Trump Organization for financial fraud; Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is prosecuting the Georgia election fraud case; and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, presiding over the January 6th/election interference case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Meanwhile, there have been three high-profile police and security guard killings of Black people in Wisconsin and Illinois, the host states of the Republican and Democratic conventions this summer.
In Milwaukee, out-of-town police brought in for the Republican convention shot and killed Samuel Sharpe, an unhoused man with cerebral palsy, while security guards at a downtown hotel pinned down and killed 43-year-old father D’Vontaye Mitchell. Outside Chicago, in the state capital of Springfield, a white police officer shot and killed 36-year-old Sonya Massey, after she called 911 for help. The officer has been charged with first-degree murder.
Racism and sexism are not only toxic, but can kill. They have no place in our political discourse, and no place on the presidential campaign trail.