Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
In the immediate wake of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race and his endorsement of Vice-President Kamala Harris as his successor, Republicans have mostly focused on attacking the changed Democratic ticket as an end in itself. They are weeping crocodile tears for the president and primary voters who are allegedly the victims of a “coup” (a coup inconveniently brought to fruition by Biden himself). And they are pretending not to understand that there’s a difference between Biden’s fitness as a candidate and his fitness to complete his term. They will spend plenty of time in court trying to complicate the handoff and will treat it as a scandal somehow as terrible as those Donald Trump has abetted so regularly.
Sooner rather than later, though, the GOP, the Trump-Vance campaign, and conservative media will focus all of their attention on the new Democratic ticket, and especially Harris. From past experience and current intimations, we have a pretty good idea of some of the attack lines they will launch and relaunch. Here are the arguments they’re likely to make.
A subset of the conservative claim that Biden has been senile for years is that his vice-president lied to us all in concealing his condition. This is a particularly active line of attack on Fox News, as the Washington Post reported:
Several Fox hosts accused Harris of being part of “a coverup,” as [Jesse] Watters put it, complicit in hiding the extent of Biden’s decline. “Right up until the last minute, she’s been lying to the American people,” [Laura] Ingraham said. On [Sean] Hannity’s show, former Trump White House official Kellyanne Conway said Harris “led the chorus of liars.” Fox host Mark Levin took an even grander and more conspiratorial tone, saying Harris “violated the Constitution every day since she’s been vice president of the United States” by not invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president, and therefore “should never be anywhere near the Oval Office.”
These are some of the same people, of course, who blame Mike Pence for failing to stand by Donald Trump on the brink of and during the January 6 insurrection. But this hypocrisy will not stop them from angrily demanding that Biden’s chosen ticketmate and now-chosen successor should have dimed him out for diminished capacity ages ago.
As a senator and as a presidential candidate in 2020, Kamala Harris was perceived generally as being right in the middle of the Democratic Party from an ideological point of view. It was part of her appeal and part of the reason Biden chose her as his running mate. But from the minute she joined the national ticket, Republicans began attacking her as a “radical leftist,” mostly because she was from California, the state the GOP regularly demonized as socialist if not satanic. Trump went so far as to call Harris a “communist” the day after his debate with Pence in 2020, a pretty clear indication that the then-president either had no clue what the term meant or was deliberately smearing his running mate’s opponent.
Since Biden himself was not a credible leftist, the idea that Harris is lurking in the background as a “radical leftist” has been a regular chorus on the MAGA right. The line of attack contradicted, of course, Harris’s loyalty to Biden’s agenda, which Republicans opposed but did not generally label “Marxist.” But the premise that Harris is something other than a regular Democrat is returning already. It will be asserted again and again.
Although Biden was the principal target of Republican speakers at the recent convention in Milwaukee, Harris was regularly dinged as allegedly responsible for the crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, as the New York Times reported:
“Kamala Harris isn’t able to do any job. She was appointed border czar,” said Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida on Wednesday to a couple of snickers in the audience. “Appointing Kamala Harris to oversee the border is like appointing Bernie Madoff to oversee your retirement plan. …”
Bob Unanue, the president of Goya Foods and chairman of the Hispanic Leadership Coalition, insulted Ms. Harris by riffing on the pronunciation of her name in Spanish to denigrate her as ineffective. “Our border czar, ‘Que-mala’ Harris — that means ‘so bad’ — and we have enough bad, we need some goodness — was missing in action,” he said.
The whole “border-czar” notion is a hoax, as CBS News explained:
In March 2021, when the Biden administration faced the early stages of an influx in illegal crossings at the U.S. southern border, Mr. Biden tasked Harris with leading the administration’s diplomatic campaign to address the “root causes” of migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, including poverty, corruption and violence.
This was largely a one-shot assignment and did not come with any responsibility for immigration policy, much less monitoring of the southern border. To the extent Harris had continuing responsibilities for “root causes” of migration, she arguably succeeded, CBS suggested:
In her immigration role, Harris’ main line of work has focused on convincing companies to invest in Central America and promoting democracy and development there through diplomacy. In March of this year, the White House announced Harris had secured a commitment from the private sector to invest over $5 billion to promote economic opportunities and reduce violence in the region.
The attack lines that come closest to the overt racism and sexism we can expect down the road suggest that Harris is the beneficiary of identity-politics tokenism, reflecting the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies of both public- and private-sector entities that Republicans have been attacking recently as subverting meritocratic values (best reflected in the claim that DEI stands for “Didn’t Earn It”). This assault on Harris began with a nasty New York Post column on July 6:
Following the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, the pressure on Biden to pick a woman of color as his running mate was intense. …
Harris checked all the boxes: Her father, an academic with a Ph.D., is from Jamaica; her late mother, a biologist, was Indian. …
First Lady Jill Biden is said to have hated her but as one Dem operative told me before Joe Biden made her his VP: “She’s black and that is all that matters.”
As the likelihood of Harris becoming the Democratic nominee increased, Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance came pretty close to calling her a “welfare queen.”
“Kamala Harris said something to the effect that I have no loyalty to this country,” Vance said at his first campaign rally as VP. “I don’t know, Kamala, I did serve in the United States Marine Corps and build a business.”
And Republican congressman Tim Burchett closed the loop by claiming that “the media” has “dumped [Biden] for our DEI vice-president.”
The depths to which Team Trump will likely descend in going after Harris is best reflected in a slur from a right-wing activist suggesting that her career was based on sex rather than her talent and hard work:
This reference to her long-ago relationship with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown was echoed by former Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly:
Yes, it’s going to get worse.
