There is a right way and a wrong way to attack Kamala Harris. And right now, unfortunately, the Trump campaign is doing it the wrong way.
This is both troubling and disappointing, if for no other reason than that it increases the probability that Kamala Harris could end up winning in November. A possibility that should be genuinely terrifying to anyone who claims to love this country or care about its people.
The wrong way to attack Kamala is to try and portray her as being a far left radical, someone who is somehow even to the left of AOC and ‘The Squad’ while also pushing racially charged insinuations (basically what the Trump campaign is currently engaged in right now).
While it is true that many of her positions are in fact ‘far left’ compared to the views of normal Americans, in comparison to the rest of her party, it’s not exactly true. Harris’ general record is as a rather centrist career democrat, and a profoundly cynical one at that.
She is a chameleon, a soulless bureaucrat who believes in nothing and only cares about one thing: power. This is the real angle from which she is vulnerable to attack politically. And she is vulnerable because everyone knows it’s true, even her newfound fans on the left, many of whom only support her because they know that she has no real convictions and thus would be likely to give in to almost any organized left-wing pressure campaign on almost any issue.
Regular voters can also spot this relatively easily, especially if the Trump campaign makes it the centerpiece of their case against her.
The problem is that right now this isn’t happening; the campaign has seemed to restlessly shift from one trite attack lane to another, all while the answer to their problem is sitting right in front of their faces.
Trump himself seems to intuitively grasp the nature of Kamala’s weakness: her inauthenticity. Unfortunately, this instinct translated itself into a somewhat awkward exchange during the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists when Trump accused Harris of not truly identifying as fully black until much later in life (Harris’s mother is Indian and her father is Jamaican).
While Trump’s instinct on this line of attack was correct (Harris’ perceived racial shapeshifting can be potentially understood as a commentary on her over-political inauthenticity), ultimately the key point ends up inevitably getting bogged down in the slime of racial demagoguery.
This is why it’s simply better to avoid these kinds of attacks on Harris and instead focus on simpler and more clear attacks on her inauthenticity than focus on her long history of grossly unethical behavior, opportunistic political stances, and shameless flip-flopping.
In addition to it being true, ‘Phony Kamala’ also just has a better ring to it than any of the other nicknames Trump has so far come up with for her.
Because the truth is that Harris isn’t some secret far-left antifa general, she’s something far more dangerous than that: a soulless political reptile who believes in nothing and will stop at nothing to acquire as much power for herself as possible.
And that’s why we simply cannot let her win.