It was mere moments after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election when the new narrative of the 2024 election snapped into place: The prosecutor vs. the criminal. Vice President Kamala Harris got Biden's endorsement immediately and, despite all the wishcasting articles from political journalists longing for a dramatic Democratic convention fight, it appears the party is swiftly lining up behind the former senator from California. Her jobs before getting to Washington D.C., as a prosecutor, San Francisco district attorney and California state attorney general, drew the most attention. The hope is that Harris will dust off those prosecutorial skills to make the case that Donald Trump, with his 34 felony convictions and endless other court cases involving criminal behavior, is not fit to be president again.
Trump enjoys committing pretty much every type of crime, from siccing a murderous mob after his former vice president to epic levels of business fraud, so there's a cornucopia of options for Harris to choose from. But a Harris ad from the 2020 campaign went viral online for one simple reason: It forefronts his long history of sexually assaulting women.
"She prosecuted sex predators," the ad reads. "He is one."
The message is simple and has only become more inarguable in the four years since. Back then, Trump was facing accusations from over two dozen women and was caught on tape bragging about his sexual crimes. Since then, his sex crimes have been adjudicated in court. Journalist E. Jean Carroll sued Trump for rape and for lying about it after the fact and in 2023, a jury found him liable for sexual assault and defamation to the tune of $5 million. He kept lying about it, so she sued again, this time getting an additional $83 million. In the post-verdict court filings, the judge repeatedly used the word "rape" to describe the nature of the crime. In Trump's actual criminal trial, the convictions were for campaign finance fraud. That said, the trial featured testimony from adult film actor Stormy Daniels about a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. While denying it was rape, Daniels described the sex as unwanted, saying, "He was bigger and blocking the way" and suggesting she only had sex with him to escape the situation.
So no surprise Harris went straight for this issue again in her coming-out-as-candidate speech Monday. "I was a courtroom prosecutor" who went after "predators who abused women," she told the crowd. "So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type."
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As I reported from Milwaukee, it's not just Trump anymore. The entire GOP has leaned hard into toxic masculinity and often overt misogyny. The Republican National Convention was a grotesque display of both. The convention stage was a traffic jam of men who had been violent towards women or made excuses for violence starting with the nominee himself. Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White, who praised Trump as being a master of the "tough guy business," had previously been filmed slapping his wife.
In 2021, Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, denounced women for leaving abusive husbands. The same year, he also decried allowing rape victims to abort their pregnancies, claiming all pregnancies should be forced to term, "even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient." Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson also spoke. In the past, he has argued that raping underage girls is less bad if the rapists marry them first, and complained about rape shield laws that protect the identity of victims.
This is part of the Trump campaign's strategy of shoring up support among younger men by appealing directly to the Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson fanboys. The tactic runs the risk of backfire. If female swing voters learn how much the GOP is built on apologia for sexual violence, focus group information suggests it will turn them away from Trump. With Biden as the nominee, there was a real chance this issue would stay on the back burner. Even though he was the author of the Violence Against Women Act in the 90s, Biden has proved incapable of making Trump's sexual violence a defining issue. He's tried, even using the word "rape" to describe Trump's behavior. But Biden's overall problems communicating got in the way of this message.
Harris, however, is not hobbled by the issues with talking that plagued Biden in the end. More than that, sexual violence is an issue that she can speak about with a level of authority that Biden — really, most male politicians — never could achieve. Her gender is only part of it. As she often discusses on the campaign trail, Harris got her start in criminal law by working in the sex crimes division of Alameda County. She spent years talking about these hard issues in a court setting, and it shows in the way she strikes a deft balance between sensitivity and frankness when speaking about sexual violence. I recommend watching this co-interview she did on MSNBC with Hadley Duvall, a child sex abuse survivor who has been speaking out about abortion rights. Harris tells the story of her high school friend who told her that her stepfather was molesting her. "I said to her: ‘you have to come live with us. I called my mother and my mother said, ‘of course she has to come stay with us.’"
Similarly, Harris was roundly praised for her performance during the contentious Senate hearing when Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett Kavanaugh of attempted rape during his confirmation hearing to join the Supreme Court. Harris demonstrated that she speaks of this issue with compassion and candor that puts victims at ease.
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These skills will make it possible for Harris to do what Biden just couldn't: Call out Trump's sexual violence and the GOP's complicity, in a way that will hopefully keep the issue in the news.
But this ability will matter just beyond lambasting Trump for his personal violence. Having a candidate who can talk about this without squirming or tripping over words is especially important in a race where abortion is a central issue. Ten states have passed abortion bans that have no exceptions for rape victims. The news is still peppered with stories of underage rape victims being forced to travel out of state or worse, give birth to a rapist's child. The Republican vice presidential nominee wants a national standard of forced childbirth for rape victims. Having a candidate who can speak about the horrors of this in an experienced and concise manner may matter a lot.
Trump and his team aren't hiding their full-blown panic that Biden dropped out. They're scared for many reasons. Their entire campaign could be boiled down to "Biden is too old," and now it's Trump who is the old and incoherent guy in the race. But I suspect it's also because Harris could blow up their strategy to turn out young male voters. The campaign obviously hoped they could send misogynist signals to certain kinds of young men, without female swing voters noticing. And it probably would have worked with Biden at the top of the ticket, unable to draw attention to what Trump is doing. Harris won't have that problem. She can do one interview and speech after another where she reminds female voters that Trump is a sexual predator and that he and his team would ban abortions, even for rape victims. With her background, she may be in a better position to push this issue than any other potential Democratic nominee could have been.
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