When President Joe Biden passed the torch to Kamala Harris, she almost immediately went on the attack against Donald Trump. This represented a radical change compared to how Biden approached the Democrats’ political battle with Donald Trump and his MAGAfied Republican Party.
Trump’s strengths and brand are based on being a bully. He insults his enemies. He shows no respect for norms of behavior or human decency. Trump attacks again and again until his target is left shell-shocked. In total, Trump attempts to dominate and control every situation. His social dominance orientation is centered on hostile sexism, crude masculinity, and of course racism.
In a recent essay at the Guardian, Carter Sherman writes:
[B]ut Americans’ obsession with masculinity is, to the point that it can determine the outcome even of presidential elections where two men are running. (So, most of them.) Americans revere presidents as role models, fixating on their status – real or perceived – as founding fathers, real fathers, war heroes, and masters of diplomacy and making money and cheating on their wives without getting caught (or, at least, without getting divorced). Because presidents epitomize American notions of manhood, elections reveal what kind of man, what type and degree of masculinity, is most respected and deserving of power.
Trump has turned his campaign into a pitch for hyper-traditional masculinity. At this year’s Republican national convention, he walked on stage to the James Brown song It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and was introduced by Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship who was caught slapping his wife on camera. On the campaign trail, he has hammed it up with YouTubers and podcasters who have male-centric audiences and dim views of women.
With the general public and her opponent so preoccupied by masculinity, Harris is not emphasizing her pioneering nomination. Rather, in order to win a contest that no woman has ever won, she’s trying to take advantage of stereotypes about men, women and leadership – and, when they can’t work in her favor, using them to kneecap Trump instead.
Masculinity, it turns out, may be the most partisan issue in US politics.
In a bold move, instead of trying to avoid Trump’s perceived strengths, Harris and her campaign attacked them through mockery and ridicule. Trump is notoriously thin-skinned and easily provoked. Harris has used that character flaw against him very successfully; Trump almost always takes the bait.
Instead of engaging Trump on his terms, Harris either outright ignores him or responds as though he is an adult baby throwing a tantrum. Where others have backed down, Harris, who is a former prosecutor, knows that the best strategy is to usually directly confront the bullies and common thugs because they are not used to such a response – especially from a woman. For example, during their first and likely only debate, Harris confronted and directly engaged Trump’s lies and bullying behavior. When that happened it appeared as if Trump did not know what to do. Trump, an alpha male and America’s First White President, was symbolically castrated and neutered by Kamala Harris, a Black South Asian woman.
In a series of recent conversations with me here at Salon, political scientist M. Steven Fish described Harris’ version of a high-dominance leadership style and how she deployed it to defeat Trump during their debate last month:
[D]uring the debate she scrapped the time-worn, fruitless Democratic practice of treating Trump mainly as a dangerous, imperious liar. Instead, she cast him as insecure, tiresome, and small. Playing on Trump’s crowd-size obsession, she invited viewers to attend a Trump rally, telling them they would see the crowds thinning out early as bored spectators headed for the doors. A stammering Trump responded, “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics!” and then launched into his conspiracy theory lies about how immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Rather than just calling Trump a friend of dictators, she got deliciously derisive. She mentioned that “It is well known that he exchanged love letters with Kim Jong Un” and pointed out that “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.” Turning to Trump, she said America’s enemies were rooting for him since “they can manipulate you with flattery and favors. And that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace.”
Trump and his surrogates — most notably his vice-presidential pick JD Vance — have reacted with more racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, misogyny, threats of violence, demagoguery, lies, and other antidemocratic and antisocial behavior. As powerfully described by Stephen Collinson at CNN, Trump and his campaign have gone “feral.”
Harris and her surrogates are not deterred by Trump and his campaign’s response to the growing pressure. For example, Harris has challenged Trump to a second debate. In a wise move, after being thrashed and publicly crushed by her during their first encounter, Trump has declared that there will not be a rematch. In a new ad, Harris’s campaign is using Trump’s attempts to escape a second debate as part of their high-dominance leadership strategy. The Washington Post reports:
For the millions of football fans who tuned in from home for Saturday night’s much anticipated matchup between the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama, she also ran a new ad nationally on ABC that hammers home her point.
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“Winners never back down from a challenge. Champions know it’s anytime, anyplace. But losers, they whine and waffle and take their ball home,” the narrator says at the start of the spot, over images of a football game and washed-out footage of Trump missing a golf putt.
The 30-second ad ends with footage of Harris challenging him to another debate, with the words “When we fight, we win” hanging on a sign in the background.
“Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage. If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,” Harris says.
Her campaign also hired a plane to trail the words “Trump’s Punting on 2nd Debate” over Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Saturday night, where Trump was attending the game. But the plane was not cleared to fly because of the weather.
As the Post reports, the Harris campaign is challenging Trump’s masculinity directly:
In recent weeks, the Harris campaign has been sending surrogates on cable news to mock Trump’s rejection of another meeting in increasingly blunt terms. David Plouffe, a top strategist for Harris, has called Trump “chicken man” on social media because of his decision to not agree to another debate.
“She took his lunch money last time,” Harris-Walz campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu said Thursday on MSNBC. “He lost and he knows it and he’s afraid of being humiliated again,” Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) said days earlier.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) went even further on Sept. 21. “If you remember the first debate, he would not even look at her once. He never even glanced at her because he is a coward,” he said. “He’s too scared to debate her.”
They are also attacking Trump in his safe space. Harris’ campaign posted the aforementioned campaign ad on the Trump’s Truth Social platform. The Democratic National Committee also reportedly has plans to use billboards and other means to brand Trump as a “chicken” because of his refusal to debate Harris a second time.
Harris’ high-dominance leadership style appears to be working, but it must still overcome the final test of if enough (white) Americans will be comfortable with a Black woman as president or will the country’s deep institutional, systemic, and cultural (and interpersonal) hostility and biases towards Black people.
In another example of her high-dominance leadership style, Kamala Harris is undermining Trump’s political brand and persona as a tough guy and badman who is a fighter who respects (and admires) tyrants and “killers” like Vladimir Putin and brags that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and still get elected. On this latter point, Trump is likely quite correct. During a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, Harris confidently and unapologetically shared how she is a gun owner who will defend herself and her family with lethal force if necessary. Harris’ comments about being a gun owner (both in conversation with Oprah Winfrey and elsewhere) are also an attempt to chip away at Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s brand name as being the exclusive defenders of “gun rights,” and how guns are deeply connected in the American popular imagination (and law and culture) with white masculinity and power.
“Democrats don’t need Harris to go out and shoot guns in her campaign ad or on the campaign trail,” Nichole Bauer, a Louisiana State University professor who studies political communication, explained to the Guardian. “But they do need her to display those masculine qualities that we associate with political leaders, and those are really masculine qualities that we don’t always think of as being gendered – like talking about her experience as a vice-president, an attorney general, a senator.”
Military leadership and service (and the claims on rights and citizenship that come with it) are also broadly perceived in American culture (and other cultures around the world) as being the near-exclusive province of men and “traditional” masculinity. To that point, the role of president and commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on the planet is also gendered and coded as being male. Harris is also showing strength against Trump in that arena as well. Last week, Harris was endorsed by more than 700 national security leaders and former military officials.
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At Slate, Fred Kaplan focuses on how Harris’ acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago demonstrated her strengths in national security:
Most of her speech dealt with traditional domestic themes, but the passages on defense and foreign policy formed in many ways the most impassioned part of her speech—and certainly rank among the most muscular delivered by any candidate at a Democratic convention in living memory….
None of this should be overstated. Biden has been the leading figure in Biden’s foreign policy. His special advisers—National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA Director William Burns—have been the main executors. But Kamala Harris has been in the room where it’s happened; she’s observed all of it and engaged in much of it. That alone makes her more prepared to step up to the job of commander in chief than any incoming president, except for Biden himself, in more than 50 years.
That is what the last night of the Democratic convention put on display: an underrated veep suddenly thrust to the top bill and appearing, surprisingly, already presidential.
A recent public opinion poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs (AP-NORC) shows that Harris’ high dominance leadership style and attacks on Trump’s brand of hyper-masculinity appear to be working. The Daily Beast summarizes, “According to the numbers, voters chose Harris 59 percent over Trump’s 57 percent when it came to which candidate they felt was tough enough to be president. As for which candidate would change the country for the better, Harris beat Trump again 55 percent compared to 46 percent. Voters also said Harris was more likely to fight for them than Trump, scoring 54 percent and 43 percent respectively.”
The poll was conducted before the second apparent assassination attempt against Trump in Florida. Harris is now leading Trump in the national polls. They are essentially tied in the battleground states that will decide the results of the election in the Electoral College. Public opinion polls have consistently shown that “national security” and “the border” are strengths for Donald Trump and the Republicans.
Kamala Harris is a Black woman. Harris, like other Black women, experiences the double bind of having to navigate racism and sexism. Harris’ high-dominance leadership style appears to be working, but it must still overcome the final test of if enough (white) Americans will be comfortable with a Black woman as president or will the country’s deep institutional, systemic, and cultural (and interpersonal) hostility and biases towards Black people – and highly competent and highly confident Black women in particular – move them to put aspiring Dictator Trump back in the White House.
The “personal is political” is not an exclusive slogan and principle of feminists, liberals and “the left” broadly defined. White men are Trump’s strongest supporters. In Harris’ strong leadership and successful undermining of Trump’s brand of masculinity and bullying behavior, many white men may feel that as a type of collective narcissistic injury and attack on their own egos and growing feelings of insecurity and obsolescence in a changing country and world (in reality, the data consistently shows that white men as a group still dominate American society and its centers of economic, political, and cultural power). When white men decide between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on election day, aggrieved white masculinity and white rage (and the white women and others who are invested in it) may be, as it historically has, the fulcrum on which the future of American democracy and society pivots.
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