Donald Trump can't get any attack to stick to Kamala Harris

Donald Trump is attacking Kamala Harris like it is the 1950s. He and his mouthpieces — most notably his vice-presidential running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance — are effectively arguing that the vice president, like other women, should know that her rightful place is in the home and not in the Oval Office.

Trump and his agents are also attacking Harris’ reputation as a sort of “fallen woman." On his Truth Social disinformation site, Trump recently shared misogynistic posts suggesting as much. If the Republican Party had any semblance of decency — which it has not shown for some time — Trump and his agents' disgusting attacks about Kamala Harris' intimate life would be utterly disqualifying.

Kamala Harris is the country’s first Black and South Asian woman to be a major political party’s presidential nominee. Trump and his agents view that as disqualifying. To them, Harris is some type of racial trickster who inherently cannot be trusted to lead the country.

Trump, groping for effective avenues of attack and vulnerability against Kamala Harris, is now calling her a “Commie”, a “Marxist” and “Comrade Kamala,” falsely claiming that she wants to impose “Soviet-style price controls” on the American people. It is as though his mentor Roy Cohn, who was instrumental in the 1950s Red Scare, has been reanimated as a type of ghost who is advising the corrupt ex-president from beyond the grave.

In a sharp new essay at CNN, Stephen Collinson describes Trump’s strategy against Harris as his “feral political offensive.” Trump is not interested in winning the election against Harris based on policy but instead on attacking her humanity and personhood. The Washington Post details the logic behind Trump’s feral offensive:

With little chance of improving Trump’s standing, Trump’s advisers see the only option as damaging hers.

“What matters is their ability to prosecute a case to the point where she feels like she needs to answer questions and that she’s on defense,” said Josh Holmes, a prominent GOP consultant. “I think it’s a serious paper tiger we’re dealing with here. I don’t think for 60 days they can keep the train on the tracks.”

Republicans have already started pummeling Harris with attack ads. The bulk of television spending by the campaigns and their allied super PACs between Aug. 23 and Aug. 29 — 57 percent — were attacks on Harris, according to data from the media-tracking company AdImpact. Twenty-one percent were pro-Harris ads that drew a contrast with Trump, and another 14 percent were purely positive about Harris, the data showed. Only 8 percent were anti-Trump attack ads.

“This is a moment in the message arc of us seeking to define her, she’s seeking to define herself,” a Trump adviser said. “We have a defined candidate — everyone knows everything about the person. There’s lots of new information about Kamala Harris that people just don’t know.”

As another adviser told reporters last month: “If you think this race is going to be decided on likability, you’re making a grave error because neither one of them is going to be liked at the end of this race.”

At this point, Trump’s feral attack strategy appears to not be working in terms of drawing in new supporters. Harris and Trump are basically tied in the polls — but Harris has the momentum and a much larger political war chest. Harris is also chipping away at Trump in several of the key battleground states. Internal communications that were recently obtained by the news media suggest that Trump’s own campaign views several of those races, such as in New Hampshire, as unwinnable.

Still, public opinion polls are a snapshot in time and are not predictive of the final outcome. Much can and will happen in the weeks ahead. The first debate is tonight and Trump is well-practiced and in his element. 

There is the reality that Trump and his propagandists’ new Red Scare smears against Kamala Harris could potentially backfire. Most importantly, Harris is not a communist, a socialist, or even a Marxist. She believes in private property, is upwardly mobile and affluent, a member of the elite class, and one of the senior members of a Democratic Party that has embraced “free market solutions,” Silicon Valley, and Wall Street instead of the needs of average Americans for decades.

Actual communists would mock and deride any suggestion that Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s vice president, shares their beliefs.

Political science research and public opinion polls have also demonstrated that when Americans, especially young people, actually learn about “socialism” (here meaning the types of social democracy practiced in many European countries) the more they support such policies.

What Harris is proposing in terms of expanding the social safety net (expanding access to healthcare, education, and offering marginal amounts of student debt relief) and increasing opportunities for upward mobility and intergenerational wealth creation for the middle and working classes are supported by a majority of Americans. To that point, a recent public opinion poll by YouGov shows that Harris’ economic proposals enjoy wide support among both Republicans and Democrats.

There is also the reality that Trump and his agents’ feral political attacks on “Comrade Kamala” could find traction –- this is true despite how many in the mainstream news media, and especially centrist liberals and progressives — would like to believe they will not because such attacks against Harris are so “absurd”, “dumb” and “weird.”

The American public is politically unsophisticated, which means that many people are easily moved by emotional appeals and scary-sounding words — at least to them — such as “communism” and “socialism.” The average American would not be able to accurately define such concepts, however. They most certainly would not be able to correctly define what a political ideology even is. [Trump and his agents have also attacked Harris as being a communist and a fascist. These political ideologies are, in most contexts, mutually exclusive. Of course, such facts and basic details of political philosophy and reality are irrelevant to Donald Trump and the right wing.]

Attacking Harris as a “communist” or “socialist” also has deep roots in how African-American political leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had their reputations and political projects impugned and undermined by the country’s news media and political class (and as part of a concerted effort of sabotage and infiltration by the FBI and other law enforcement known as COINTELPRO). In that way, attacking Harris as a communist or socialist or “big city San Francisco liberal” is an attempt to trigger white racial resentment and white rage that Black people are inherently un-American and unpatriotic, seeking to take money away from “the makers” (white people) and give it to “the takers” (undeserving, lazy Black and brown people).

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

The question then becomes are there enough white voters (and others such as Cubans who, as a group, tend to be staunchly anticommunist) who can be sufficiently triggered by such old Cold War era attacks to support Donald Trump and the neofascist MAGA movement?

In a new opinion essay at the New York Times, David Brooks works through a scenario where Harris is defeated by Trump and the role that fears of “socialism” and “big government” played in the electoral outcome:

People like the red model more than the blue model. The fastest-growing states by population are mostly governed by Republicans, including Florida, Texas, Idaho and Montana. The fastest-shrinking or -stagnating states are mostly governed by Democrats, including New York, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and Hawaii. The red model gives you low housing costs, lower taxes and business vitality. The blue model gives you high housing costs, high taxes and high inequality.

Democrats want to expand the welfare state so that our social insurance system would look more like Europe’s. But Europe is economically stagnant and falling behind. In 2021, households in the European Union enjoyed, on average, only 61 percent of the disposable income Americans enjoyed. By this measure, rich European countries like Norway are behind poor American states like Mississippi. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, large European corporations invested 60 percent less than American corporations in 2022 and grew at two-thirds the pace. For a decade, Europe has been falling behind on capital development, research and development, and productivity growth. Even the vaunted German economy has basically flatlined since 2018.

Many American voters might envy the long European vacations, but they want economic dynamism more. For years voters in swing states had been telling pollsters that the economy and inflation were their top issues. They looked around the country and concluded that the Republican approach seemed better at generating dynamism and growth, or at least better than Harris’s pitch for and defense of Bidenomics.

Although they present it as some type of restoration or golden age, Donald Trump and his MAGAfied Republicans and the larger neofascist movement represent a return to the worst parts of the American past. Kamala Harris and the Democrats are offering a competing vision of the future, one that expands and protects democracy and freedom for the American people. On Election Day, the American people will decide which vision they prefer.