Vice President Kamala Harris speaking at a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Sunday. David Yeazell/AP
The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Is it racist, misogynist, or misogynoirist for Donald Trump to refer to Vice President Kamala Harris as “retarded,” as he recently did during a dinner at Trump Tower with his fat-cat billionaire donors, according to the New York Times? His routine disparagement of her as “dumb” and “mentally disabled” comes across as bigotry. Now you—or someone—might say, this isn’t Trump being biased; he treats all his political foes that way and engages in equal-opportunity slander. But there’s something sharper here than his usual immature and false taunts. At a rally last month, he remarked, “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way”—setting her apart in his fusillade of demeaning insults.
Slamming this accomplished Black woman with a long history of public service as a person born mentally inferior—see the recent Our Land issue on Trump and genes—seems a racist and/or misogynist act. Especially when it comes from a man with a lengthy and undeniable record of racism and misogyny. While such campaign rhetoric would have once been considered a campaign scandal—in 1980 when President Jimmy Carter accurately noted that the Ku Klux Klan had endorsed Ronald Reagan, the political press attacked him for being mean—these Trump comments cause Trump no political discomfort. They barely trigger any controversy.
Trump appears to have created a permission structure for bias-driven assaults on Harris.
In fact, Trump appears to have created a permission structure for bias-driven assaults on Harris. In right-wing media, commentators are having a field day. Writing for the American Spectator, a fellow named Scott McKay declared “Kamala Harris hates men” and “doesn’t seem to associate with any men worth respecting.” Referring to 55,000 American men who died in Vietnam—don’t ask why he even brought this up—he wrote,
Kamala Harris doesn’t give a damn about any of those 55,000 dead Americans.
She doesn’t give much of a damn about the 330 million current live Americans. And she certainly doesn’t give a damn about the male subset of that population.
How could she? Nothing in Kamala Harris’ political background shows that she has any respect for, or appreciation of, masculinity.
The article raised crude speculations about her personal life and blasted Harris for having an affair with California politician Willie Brown while he was married. And McKay demanded to know if she ever had an abortion. Has the American Spectator treated Trump in similar fashion, branded him as dishonorable for his dalliances and requested he state whether he ever paid for or arranged for an abortion? (By the way, Harris dated Brown years after he separated from his wife.) McKay also insisted that Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband, is “no male that any real man would respect,” citing his extramarital affair that ended his first marriage. (Apparently, Trump’s affairs are weighed differently.) And McKay ended by asserting, “We can see from [Harris’] rhetoric and her actions she has little to no respect for men.”
The American Spectator was trying very hard here. When it comes to not respecting an entire gender, does its editorial staff no longer remember this Trump ditty: “I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there…And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”? (And since we’re talking about masculinity, here’s a pop quiz: Who wears more makeup?)
The double-standardizing is staggering. But it is open season on Harris for being a woman. On the far-right Front Page website, Mark Tapson—under the headline “Why Men Won’t Vote For Kamala. Hint: It’s Not Misogyny”—wrote that Harris has been unable to “garner the support of male voters.” And this is the reason why: “To be clear: no one, male or female, truly likes Kamala Harris, because as a politician she is unlikeable.” And he added, “She is not a leader.”
The managing editor of the far-right Federalist, Kylee Griswold, growled that Harris is “too stupid to be president.”
If this is not misogyny, Tapson was certainly judging her differently than Trump. No one likes Harris? In some polls, she’s ahead of Trump by a bit, but the race is essentially a toss-up at this moment. Someone must like her. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 51 percent of male registered voters backed Trump, and 43 percent favored Harris. That’s a significant gender gap. But look at women: 52 percent of female registered voters support Harris, and 43 percent support Trump. Her deficit with men is basically the same as Trump’s with women. Would Tapson cite Trump’s problem with women as a sign he’s not likable and is not regarded by voters as a leader?
At the Federalist, the hate is also boiling over. The far-right online publication’s managing editor, Kylee Griswold, growled that Harris is “too stupid to be president.” Asserting that “her whole personality is the color of her skin,” she maintained that Harris is “not smart, articulate, or likable…Democrats have fallen in line behind geriatric and mentally impaired candidates before. They’ll gladly fall in line behind a stupid one now.” Maybe this is not misogyny or racism (though I’m not certain what the reference to the “color of her skin” meant), but with this rant—which claimed Harris was dumb and inarticulate when it comes to discussing policy—Griswold was judging Harris on a scale the Federalist crew does not apply to the man in the race.
Conservatives have plenty of reason to criticize Harris for her assorted policy preferences. Yet right-wingers who worship at the altar of Donald Trump—and embrace him despite his lies, demagoguery, ignorance, racism, misogyny, violent and fascist rhetoric, mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, and incitement of the January 6 riot—feel compelled to follow Dear Leader in brutally debasing the first Black woman to become the presidential nominee of a major party. It sure smells of racial bigotry and gender prejudice—a stink that Trump has emanated for years.
