Harris does not compute
It’s like watching Rocky’s rematch with Clubber Lang. Clubber is suffering a flurry of jabs from the fitter, faster, more-skilled Rocky. He’s throwing punches and missing, breathing hard, wearing himself out. In his American flag trunks, Rocky taunts him, “My mother hits harder than that!”
Announcer: “I don’t think Lang knew what hit him yet in this whole first round.”
It’s a joy to watch, says Michael Tomasky in The New Republic, now that Donald Trump is the target and VP Kamala Harris is throwing punches. It’s still the first round, but Trump is tossing around “bananas” accusations and visibly flailing:
But wait. These are just the appetizers! Then he called Harris a “communist” and said the country under her leadership would devolve into a commie dystopia in which “everyone gets health care” (the horror!). And then, the piece de resistance: At the Jewish event, he praised Miriam Adelson, the huge Trump donor and widow of Sheldon Adelson, mentioning that he’d given her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he noted was the civilian equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor (given to military veterans) but was “actually much better” because people who receive the latter medal are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
You know how they say in sports that an opponent has gotten inside the other team’s head? Well, Harris and Tim Walz have certainly gotten inside Trump’s head. Walz’s “weird” comment, which Trump has also responded to in a, well, sort of weird way, was just the start. Harris has also smartly refused to take the GOP campaign’s bait, like when Trump attacked her race and J.D. Vance tried to make her childlessness an issue. Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz campaign trolls Trump in its press releases with snarky language I don’t recall Joe Biden’s or Hillary Clinton’s campaigns using. It sends the message, which must drive him nuts, that they don’t fear him at all.
Meanwhile, what else is Harris doing? Starting to unveil an economic package that, so far anyway, looks pretty great. It’s aimed straight at middle-class voters and focused on housing and grocery prices. You can’t get more kitchen table than that. And the bit about going after corporate price gougers is great. It sends a nice populist signal that she’s willing to make some enemies.
Trump is “a hot mess.” He’s facing someone the right hasn’t been trained to hate for 25 years. To his chagrin (horror?), Americans like her. And Gov. Tim Walz from “Minnesota nice” country.
Tomasky concludes, “He can’t understand this, and he simply can’t stand it. Trump’s like a predatory animal in a literal sense. Since he has no conscience, he’s all instinct, and his instinct is to find his prey’s weakness and go after it over and over.” He hasn’t found hers.
More to the point, Trump and his MAGA followers were blindsided by the hand-off to Harris because they cannot fathom Joe Biden (or anyone) giving up power for the good of the country and his party. In the might-make-right MAGA universe, that does not compute.
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