Editorial: Pitted against Kamala Harris, can Trump tone down the racism and misogyny?

Vice President Kamala Harris is the highest-ranking female in U.S. political history and the first Black woman and Asian American to hold her post. The 59-year-old lawyer is a former U.S. senator and served as California attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney.

Yet when former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s nominee to be returned to the highest office in the land, speaks of Harris, he inevitably lowers himself to the language of racists and misogynists.

At his first political rally after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee — and despite all the calls from both inside and outside his party for unity and civility — the 78-year-old New York native, who once held the powerful post occupied by such statesmen as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, mocked Harris as “nuts” and “crazy.”

“Kamala, I call her laughing Kamala,” Trump told the crowd gathered in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Have you seen her laughing? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She is nuts. She is not as crazy as Nancy Pelosi.”

Trump’s supporters ate it up, of course. MAGA enthusiasts started calling her the “DEI candidate” well before President Joe Biden’s announcement Sunday that he is not running for reelection.

With Biden’s subsequent endorsement of Harris, and as each hour goes by and more Democrats rally to her candidacy, the vice president is clearly in the spotlight. And what message does it send to millions of Americans when a political rival directs himself not to her policies or positions, not to her resume or experience, but to crude, playground-level name-calling?

Language that seems coarse when directed at a white male (“Sleepy Joe” or “Crooked Joe” as Trump so often describes Biden) comes across as something far more malevolent and destructive when aimed at an educated and accomplished woman.

Let us not fool ourselves into believing that “anyone born in this country can grow up to be the president of the United States.” That is surely our ambition, but it is not our reality — at least not until it’s been demonstrated at least once by a woman or, better yet, a woman of color.

Republicans claim to be the party of liberty, opportunity, freedom, and law and order. So why not run on a legitimate platform and not appeal to the baser instincts of voters? And please don’t tell us that this is all just harmless shtick.

It isn’t. One would think that Trump’s history of sexual misconduct — including sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996 and for having an intimate encounter with porn star Stormy Daniels in 2006 and subsequently paying her to keep silent about it when he ran for president — would preclude gender-based attacks, with both matters having resulted in costly court action. But they haven’t.

Polls suggest Trump is in a strong position right now. Harris is in an unprecedented one. So doesn’t it make more sense – for Trump’s own sake as well as the country’s — for the Republican nominee to show some inkling of respect for a Black woman?

If nothing else, it seems counterproductive for a candidate (a convicted felon at that) who has suddenly gotten a bit weak-kneed over his past attacks on women’s reproductive rights (claiming victory over the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade yet backpedaling over a national abortion ban) to treat Harris so disrespectfully.

Has the Trump campaign forgotten how much a lack of support from political moderates and women cost him in the past, especially in 2020? In Grand Rapids, Trump referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as “brilliant” and Russian President Vladimir Putin as “smart” and “tough.” Yet he described a fellow American, an accomplished woman of color, as “crazy.” What are we to make of that?

This isn’t about diversity, equity and inclusion. This isn’t about socialism. It’s mostly about basic human decency. Here in Baltimore, as is no doubt happening in many, many other communities across the nation, young Black girls are watching this week’s extraordinary events and perhaps even seeing themselves in Kamala Harris.

And what are they to think when this trailblazer is attacked for her use of quirky catchphrases or the sound of her laugh and not by the content of her message?

Trump may yet win another term in the White House but the damage he may do before he gets there could prove lasting, if wholly unnecessary.

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