LONDON: The image of Kamala Harris emerging as a strong leader, while Trump looked and sounded irredeemably negative and dour, created shock waves throughout the Republican establishment.
Presidential elections in America are nearly always messy, but this one is getting dirty. As the Republicans and Democrats have hyper-efficiently divided America, the crucial election on 5 November is likely to be decided on the narrowest of margins in the so-called “swing states”. It’s in these states that there are growing fears (with some evidence) that Donald Trump’s team is laying the groundwork to contest the election and delegitimise a Harris victory – just one of the many dirty tricks the Republicans are using to thwart the wishes of the electorate. The danger inherent in the spread of election denial in these battleground states is amplified by the harrowingly close state of the presidential race, largely brought about by Donald Trump’s bewilderment on how to fight his unexpected opponent—Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the lead up to Tuesday’s debate, Trump laboured to find an effective attack line against Harris, who has unleashed a wave of energy amongst her party since she took over Biden’s dwindling campaign to be re-elected. Doing his best to stay in the public eye, Trump has disregarded his aides’ advice to focus on policy. Instead he has repeatedly attempted to seize the political initiative by a series of personal attacks on his opponent, disregarding the fact that he has been convicted on 34 felony counts in a New York State case related to hush money payments allegedly to a porn star, as well as having to pay steep civil fines for repeatedly lying about his personal wealth.
For years, Donald Trump has been known for making crass remarks about anyone who differs from him, but even many of his supporters believe he has gone too far in his attacks on Harris, shattering longstanding norms on political speech. For example, he has falsely claimed that Harris, who is Black and South Asian, only recently “became a Black person.” Speaking to a convention of Black Journalists in Chicago last month, Trump declared “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know—is she Indian? Or is she Black?”
Trump has a long and ugly history of racism, falsely accusing Barak Obama, the country’s first black president, of not being born in the United States. But now the crude misogynistic and sexist sides of his character are on full display. On his personal website Truth Social (a risible title for the disingenuous and super-ego Trump) a user had posted images of Kamala Harris and Hilary Clinton on 28 August with the text: “Funny how blowjobs impacted their careers differently…” In a move that reprised his past record of extreme sexist behaviour, Trump immediately amplified this crude remark by reposting it. It was the second time in ten days that the former president had made sexually oriented attacks on his opponent, suggesting that she had traded favours to help her political career.
Donald Trump is not alone in racially and sexually attacking Kamala Harris. Almost immediately after she won the Democratic Party’s nomination, an online explosion of misogynistic and sexist narratives about her appeared on the web, many of them previously debunked falsehoods. Some social media posts repeated suggestions that Harris “slept her way to the top” in American politics, citing her brief relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. The charge was re-floated by a number of conservative influencers who posted on X a doctored image of Harris appearing to pose alongside disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Much disinformation involved not only sexual tropes, but also false transphobic narratives. For example, Harris could not possibly have ascended politically without secretly being a man. Other racist narratives falsely asserted Harris was “ineligible” to run for office because both her parents were immigrants, while some insisted that she was “exaggerating” her racial identities for political gain. In many ways, these attacks were not surprising. A study carried out by the Washington-based Centre for Democracy and Technology concluded that candidates of colour in the 2020 US elections were twice as likely as other candidates to be targeted with disinformation. They were also four times as likely as white candidates to be targeted with violent abuse. Another study carried out in 2020 by Nina Jankowicz, co-founder of the disinformation watchdog American Sunlight Project, reported that during the elections there were more than 336,000 instances of “gender abuse and disinformation” used to attack 13 women politicians. Some 78 percent of those targeted Kamala Harris.
In the event, Harris was a clear winner in Tuesday’s debate. Her victory over former President Donald Trump was not as dramatic as Trump’s victory over President Joe Biden in their infamous July debate, but it was nevertheless distinctively one-sided. With a disciplined and on-message approach, Harris stuck calmly to policy, a method that rattled Trump who scored own goal after own goal. During his entire political career, Trump has been unburdened with the truth, and this was evident during Tuesday’s debate when he was undisciplined and incoherent, blusteringly making up his own facts. When the subject of his multiple indictments was raised, he brushed them aside as “fake cases”, even though everyone knows that he is now a convicted felon. Trump yet again insisted, without evidence, that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and defended the violent mob that had attacked the Capitol. Perhaps the most bizarre moment came when Trump supported the conspiracy theory, weird by even his standards, that in Springfield Ohio, Haitian immigrants are abducting and devouring their neighbour’s pets. “They’re eating the dogs”, he roared, “the people that came in—they’re eating the cats”. When asked by one of the moderators for evidence, all Trump could say was “I’ve seen it on television”! A composed and relaxed Kamala Harris smiled and shook her head, knowing that her skills as an attorney had exposed Trump’s cranky and narcissistic character. Even Trump’s devoted bootlicker Senator Lindsey Graham declared after the debate that it had been a disaster for the ex-president.
So what happens now? The image of Kamala Harris emerging as a strong leader, while Trump looked and sounded irredeemably negative and dour, created shock waves throughout the Republican establishment. Trump dearly wants voters to look back, hoping the election will simply be a referendum on whether they believe they were doing better economically under his presidency than under Biden’s. Kamala Harris is just as determined that they look forward, and realise that she is the only candidate who will fight for them and deliver better results over the next four years. She will be comforted by the fact that among young women, according to one poll, she commands a staggering 67 to 29 percent lead over Trump, whom most women see as a vile misogynist.
In the meantime Trump’s cheerleaders in the media know exactly what to do—continue down the ugly, sexist and racist road. They will carry on promoting myths of how Kamala Harris rose in her career, question her racial identity and undermine her qualification for the office of president. As the presidential election heads into its final weeks, the Harris team is braced for a flood of falsehoods targeting its candidate. Widely available artificial intelligence tools are expected to add fuel to the fire on social sites such as X (formerly known as Twitter) now owned by Elon Musk who worships Trump. Musk, who has been promised a high-level job in Trump’s administration should he be voted back in to the White House, has scaled back content moderation, removing most of the guardrails against false information, and reinstated accounts of known purveyors of falsehoods.
It’s easy to see why America is bracing itself for the dirtiest election on record.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.