After Donald Trump denied that Vice President Kamala Harris is Black, several Republicans worried that their presidential nominee had stepped in it this time. During his appearance at the Association of Black Journalists convention, Trump tried out a new attack on Harris, whose father was Jamaican and mother was Indian: “I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Raving about the horrors of miscegenation only confirms the Harris campaign’s characterization of Trump as “old and quite weird,” so it’s no surprise that other Republicans are scurrying away from his remarks. The cowards mostly remained anonymous, telling Axios that they found his performance “embarrassing,” “awful” and “not a demonstration on how to win over undecided voters.”
Well, they’d better buckle up. It looks like this was no accident or gaffe from Trump, but a summation of his campaign’s strategy. As Matt Gertz writes at Media Matters:
But this wasn’t just a one-off comment, however despicable; it was the launch of a new talking point. Trump doubled down on social media, his campaign projected purported evidence of Trump’s claim at an event Wednesday night, his surrogates went on TV to defend his comments, and Vance — who once described his running mate as potentially “America’s Hitler” — told reporters Trump’s remark was “hysterical” and that the former president “pointed out the fundamental chameleon-like nature of Kamala Harris.”
Even the event itself suggests deliberation. The reporter did not ask Trump to opine on the legitimacy of mixed-race people. She asked if Trump believes Harris is qualified to run for president. He was looking for a way to say this and forced it into the conversation.
There’s an exhausting rationale, involving false claims that Harris “switches” her identity and that somehow makes her “phony.” This is a lie, of course, as there’s a long public record of Harris identifying with both of her parents for her entire life. As Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic, “The point of this rhetorical maze is simply to justify racist attacks on a particular target while deflecting accusations of bigotry.” Trump wants to make a spectacle out of Harris’ racial heritage, in hopes of provoking white anxieties about how multiracial societies are too “confusing” to be tolerated.
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It’s been long-documented, if not publicized enough, that Trump has an unsettling obsession with racial “purity” and eugenics. It’s not something he bothers to hide, as evidenced by his claims that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” But that the larger campaign is harping on this suggests they really think it’s smart strategy. As political scientist Nicholas Grossman writes in the Bulwark, MAGA devotees have convinced themselves “their ideas have widespread appeal, and the only reason their ideas aren’t dominant is that right-wing viewpoints are being erased from the public discourse by the people who control it.”
In this case, the presumption is that most voters share Trump’s repulsion for “impure” people whose gender or race falls outside rigid boundaries he has defined for them. In the same week he appointed himself the arbiter of Harris’ race, he also decided he could strip her husband, Doug Emhoff, of his Jewishness. In an interview with a right-wing radio host, Trump agreed that Emhoff is a “crappy Jew” because he married Harris. There was an elaborate excuse for this accusation, involving false claims that Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people.” But, as with the whining about Harris’ parentage, this is mostly about drawing the public’s attention to what old-timey racists called “race-mixing.”
Trump repeatedly mocks others for what he perceives as physical flaws, as if that will distract people from noticing that he’s a lumbering 78-year-old man with a comical combover.
The campaign is making the same play with gender, as well. On Fox News this week, Trump and host Laura Ingraham were making unfunny jokes about “gender-fluid” people and Trump issued a bizarre proclamation: “I don’t want pronouns.” As many folks noted, he used a pronoun in the sentence, but his audience understood what he meant. He’s expressing anger at the practice of sharing pronouns, which developed because it’s not always easy or wise to guess someone’s gender identity. To MAGA conservatives, it’s an outrage that anyone’s gender could be ambiguous enough that you can’t just assume it.
It got even uglier on Thursday, when Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, labeled a cis woman a “man” because he disapproves of her inborn biology. The whole thing started when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif beat Italian boxer Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics. Khelif was previously disqualified from another organization’s tournament based on what the IOC has called an “arbitrary” gender test. Olympic officials, however, say Khelif was “born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport.” Anti-trans bigots pounced, falsely claiming that Khelif is a “man” with an unfair advantage. There is nothing wrong with being trans, but it’s simply false to apply that label to Khelif, based on a vaguely defined test. This doesn’t appear to be a case of obvious athletic advantage, as Khelif has lost matches to other cis women.
But none of this matters to the candidate for vice president of the United States. He decided to pander to the worst people on the internet by smearing an Olympic athlete he knows nothing about. Vance tweeted on Thursday, “This is where Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender lead: to a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match.”
This is the same Vance who has repeatedly denounced women who have not given birth as “sociopathic” and “miserable cat ladies.” He was called out by actress Jennifer Aniston, who pointed out that some women want to give birth but cannot. Vance wouldn’t even apologize to the unhappily infertile. Instead, he said they should “try everything” to have biological children, “because I believe families and babies are a good thing.”
No one denies that babies or families are a good thing, for people who want them. But Vance’s apparent definition of a “good thing” is that everyone should do it, at the same time and in the same way. This rigid view excludes even those who, for medical reasons, cannot follow his strict blueprint for a “good” life. If there’s any lingering doubt about Vance’s desire to control women’s basic biology, he stripped it all away by denying a woman’s gender based on evidence that isn’t public and that he doesn’t understand.
No wonder Trump picked Vance, despite so many warnings from other Republicans that the Ohio senator was bad news. Both men express contempt for people whose body or identity doesn’t conform to their exceedingly narrow views of what it “should” be. It calls to mind the story of Trump expressing irritation at the sight of disabled veterans at Army events, telling his staff, “No one wants to see that.”
Vance even made excuses for Trump’s sneering at biracial people, even though Vance’s wife is Indian-American and his kids, like Harris, have a biracial heritage. This hypocrisy is something he shares with Trump. Trump repeatedly mocks others for what he perceives as physical flaws, as if that will distract people from the fact that he’s a lumbering 78-year-old man with a comical combover. That’s how it’s always been with fascists, who never meet their own impossible standards of Aryan perfection. No one can — and no one should even want to, since it’s all made-up nonsense anyway.
The good news is that Harris is responding with both humor and grace, calling Trump’s faux-confusion over her race “the same old show” of “divisiveness and the disrespect.” Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna, but I suspect Trump and Vance’s gambit won’t work. Most Americans find this obsessive policing of other people’s bodies and identities gross, even if they don’t know its deeper fascist history. It feels “old and quite weird” to want a full readout of everyone’s biological and ethnic heritage, so Old Man Trump can decide if it’s good enough for his liking. But if this is what the Trump-Vance campaign is setting out as its principal strategy, we’re in for an ugly fall season.
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