Y’all misogynists don’t act racist
Team MAGA was on its back foot for a couple of days after President Joe Biden on Sunday dropped out of the presidential race and passed the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. Republican attack lines prepared for one old white guy against another old white guy would need reworking to smear the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father.
Donald Trump will not be able to hold his tongue, of course. He never has. But his MAGA cultists never quite mastered the art of the dog whistle (CNN):
In an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju Monday, Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett suggested President Joe Biden selected Harris as his running mate solely because she is Black: “One hundred percent she is a DEI hire,” he said, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion. “Her record is abysmal at best.”
DEI is how one now utters the N-word if one is a Republican congressman from Knoxville. Or anyone else in the MAGA movement. (Expect Alexandra Petri and Andy Borowitz to have great fun at the GOP’s expense.)
Post by @borowitzreportView on Threads
On that subject, the Associate Press reports:
Republican leaders are warning party members against using overtly racist and sexist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, as they and former President Donald Trump ‘s campaign scramble to adjust to the reality of a new Democratic rival less than four months before Election Day.
“This election will be about policies and not personalities,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters after a Tuesday closed-door meeting with his caucus. The race is nothing personal, “and her ethnicity or her gender have nothing to do with this whatsoever.”
Johnson’s caucus and right-wing media are off to a rocky start.
“The right-wing media machine is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Kamala Harris,” writes Oliver Darcy in CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter:
Over the last 48 hours, Harris has been derided as a radical California liberal; she has been smeared as a “DEI” candidate; she has been denigrated as a “mistress” for her previous relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, even though it occurred after Brown was separated from his wife and was not a secret; she has been ridiculed for her laugh and described as unlikeable; she has been characterized as having been too tough on crime as a prosecutor, but also pro-illegal immigration; she has had her candidacy labeled a “coup”; and she has been subjected to commentators mocking even the pronunciation of her name, among other things.
[…]
“Suddenly she’s the next messiah?” Fox News host Jesse Watters said Tuesday night as he railed against Harris. “The only reason she is in the White House is because of the DEI deal Biden cut with Bernie [Sanders] to seal the nomination.”
The salvo is a page out of the right’s playbook targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, a bogeyman it has used to blame for everything from airline safety issues to the Baltimore bridge collapse.
Ask Baltimore’s Brandon Scott. After the Key Bridge collapse in March, social media posts labeled the Black mayor of the majority nonwhite city a “DEI Mayor”:
“We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” he told The Banner. “Whether it is DEI or clown. They really want to say the N-word. But there is nothing they can do and say to me that is worse than the treatment of my ancestors. I am proud of who I am and where I come from.”
Sexist and ethnic slurs are not the only weapons in the MAGA arsenal. Harris can expect a flurry of meritless legal challenges. Election law expert Rick Hasen on Monday addressed some early ones at Slate.
The Guardian reports that Team Trump on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over Harris changing the name of the Biden-Harris campaign:
The complaint, filed by the Trump campaign’s general counsel, David Warrington, argued that the Biden campaign could not rename its committee from “Biden for President” to “Harris for President” once Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, and roll over $91m.
“This is little more than a thinly veiled $91.5m excessive contribution from one presidential candidate to another, that is, from Joe Biden’s old campaign to Kamala Harris’s new campaign. This effort makes a mockery of our campaign finance laws,” the eight-page complaint said.
The reenergized Democratic campaign for president has now pulled even with Trump in new polls. The Trump campaign means to throw sand in the gears:
Whether the complaint generates traction with the FEC remains unclear, but the Trump campaign has been looking for any way to slow down the momentum Harris has been able to generate with voters and donors after she quickly became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The strategy, according to people familiar with the matter, has included opening new legal battles to try to prevent Harris from accessing Biden’s funds, although the complaint on Tuesday stopped short of a lawsuit.
Election lawyers at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center counter that “because Biden and Harris share a campaign committee, the Vice President and her running mate can continue using the campaign’s existing funds for the general election if she is on the Democratic ticket as either the presidential or vice-presidential nominee.”
Hasen believes that this Trump complaint too is headed nowhere and will take months to arrive. But that’s not the point. The GOP is in spaghetti-flinging mode for now, hoping to find a line of attack against Harris that sticks. This filing, Hasen explains, “gives Trump legal fodder to say that Harris engaged in a greater campaign finance violation than the one that formed the basis for turning his NY business records misdemeanors into felonies.”
Yes, but what Trump is really looking for is a 2024 version of “but her emails” that doesn’t scream the N-word.
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