Fans of the Broadway musical Hamilton will remember a moment late in the show when, after a series of songs about Hamilton’s personal life, one of the characters asks plaintively, “Can we get back to politics?” Joe Biden’s courageous and patriotic decision to end his presidential campaign allows American voters to refocus their attention from questions of age and infirmity and get back to politics.
The question now is what kind of politics will it be?
With Vice President Kamala Harris as the likely Democratic nominee, our politics will bring into sharp relief, indeed sharper relief than ever, a choice between embracing America as a multicultural democracy or pursuing a White Christian nationalist future. Harris is the living embodiment of the best of the American experiment.
And former President Trump can’t stand it.
Another strong, accomplished woman threatens to stand between him and his ability to satisfy his lust for power. First Hilary Clinton, then Fani Willis, now Kamala Harris. It drives him crazy.
By looking at the playbook Trump used against Clinton and Willis we can get a preview of what is to come in our politics.
Before we do, let’s assess how a Harris candidacy resets the 2024 race.
First, there is the obvious jolt of energy and excitement that helps put the recently completed Republican National Convention in the rearview mirror. That jolt of energy is reflected in the torrent of donations that already have come into Democratic coffers.
The New York Times reports that “Democrats greeted President Biden’s departure from the presidential race with an avalanche of cash, donating more than $30 million online on Sunday and making it the single biggest day for online Democratic contributions since the 2020 election — with hours still to go.
“With Mr. Biden gone and Vice President Kamala Harris building momentum to claim the nomination,” the Times said, “Democrats went online to contribute at a startling pace. Donations spiked from an average of less than $200,000 per hour in the hours before Mr. Biden quit to $7.5 million in a single hour later on Sunday.”
“This might be the greatest fundraising moment in Democratic Party history,” wrote Kenneth Pennington, a Democratic digital strategist on X.
Second, the Harris candidacy will be making history. She would be the first woman of color and the first person of South Asian and Caribbean descent to head a national ticket.
She will bring an excitement to the 2024 campaign that has been absent among progressives and young people since Barack Obama ran in 2008. People who then cried tears of joy at the thought that a Black man could be president have reason to cry again.
Third, Harris will help to energize younger voters who, before Biden’s withdrawal, saw nothing for themselves in the 2024 campaign. Those voters played a key role in the president’s 2020 victory.
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Until Sunday, the news was bad for the Democrats. On July 11, USNews reported that “many young people feel their lives have gotten worse, and they are disappointed with both major candidates for president.”
“Forty-nine percent of young adults say they’re still deciding whom to vote for or could be easily convinced to change their mind. And when asked about the most notable accomplishments of President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump, their most common answer was: nothing.”
That changed yesterday.
And the mere thought of Harris at the top of the ticket has already brought a cascade of ugly, vile taunts from Trump, exposing last week’s appeal for unity for what it is, a sham.
At a rally in Michigan on Saturday Trump mocked her. “Kamala, I call her laughing Kamala. Have you seen her laughing? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She is nuts.”
On July 9, Trump had used an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek to suggest that he didn't think that Harris was ready for prime time. He indicated that if she became the Democratic candidate for president he would tie her to Biden.
His campaign said Biden and Harris owned each other’s records, and “there is no distance between the two.”
Trump boasted that Harris would be easier to defeat than Biden. Now the plan is to paint her as not just crazy, but worse yet, as a crazy lefty.
Trump’s attack on Harris is reminiscent of what he has said in the past about women.
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In 1992, he said, “women: you have to treat him like shit.” Later, he told his biographer that his favorite part of the film Pulp Fiction was the scene when “Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool.”
“I love those lines,” Trump said.
In 1997, he wrote that women “have one of the great acts of all time.”
“The smart ones act very feminine and needy,” Trump continued, “but inside they are real killers. The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naïve or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye – or perhaps another body part.”
In Harris, a tough, accomplished former prosecutor he will be up against someone capable of showing just how skillful such a “real killer can be.”
Turning to Trump’s 2016 attacks on Hilary Clinton, as CNN reported, he accused Clinton, among other things, of being “unbalanced” and “unstable,” called her a “dangerous” and “pathological” liar and warned voters that a Clinton presidency would lead to “the destruction of this country from within.”
Previewing the kind of lines we will surely hear Trump say about Harris, he claimed: “Unstable Hillary Clinton, lacks the judgment, temperament and moral character to lead this country – and I believe that so strongly,”
“She’s really pretty close to unhinged, and you’ve seen, you’ve seen it a couple times. The people in the background know it, the people who know her know it and she’s like an unbalanced person.”
In another episode of what happens when Trump runs up against a strong accomplished woman, he used an August 2023 speech to label Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who indicted him for election interference, a “racist.”
As Trump put it: “They say there’s a young woman, a young racist in Atlanta. She’s a racist. And they say, I guess they say that she was after a certain gang and she ended up having an affair with the head of the gang or a gang member. And this is the person that wants to indict me. She’s got a lot of problems.”
In March 2024, he even mocked Willis’ first name. “It’s spelled Fani, like your ass.”
Who knows what hateful things Trump will now say about the likely Democratic nominee for president, another woman of color?
Clinton, Willis and Harris represent the kind of strong women who threaten Trump’s manhood and attachment to a bygone patriarchy. They offer a vision of a more egalitarian, inclusive America, an America that promises opportunity to people of talent no matter their race and gender.
As we get back to politics and the business of electing a president, we should remember that that vision might just be Donald Trump’s kryptonite.
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