At the 2016 Democratic convention, when it was clear that Republican nominee and serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) was going to wage a dirty campaign of lies and personal insults against Hillary Clinton, Michele Obama uttered the sentence that resonated with the crowd and that she is remembered for: “When they go low, we go high”. She was implying that Democrats would not get into a mud fight with SSACFT and the Republicans, but would take the high road and focus on the issues. It was a noble goal.
But that was then, this is now.
The early signs are that Kamala Harris is not going to hold back and is quite willing to take the fight to the Republican ticket. One of the things that the Harris campaign seems to be focusing on is that both SSACFT and Vance are both creepy and weird.
Statements put out by the newly rebranded Harris for President campaign have attacked both Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance while tapping into internet-speak and popular culture – something the team has quickly become known for.
One release in particular, sent out on Thursday, caught the attention of social media users after describing Donald Trump as, among other things, “old and quite weird.”
…Things took a turn when the statement added:“ [Trump] Praised dictators because he wants to be one; Trump is clearly worried he made the wrong pick in JD Vance; Trump is old and quite weird? This guy shouldn’t be president ever again.
“If anyone wants an alternative, Kamala Harris is offering one.”
Social media users reacted with delight to the new lines of attack, with one writing: “Kamala appears to be all-in on the ‘these guys are f***ing weird’ strategy’.”
Sharing the release, another added: “This is an official Kamala Harris campaign press release, and I don’t think that Donald Trump, or his bizarre fan club, are emotionally or intellectually prepared for what’s coming his way.”
…[Spokesperson James] Singer wrote: “Tonight, Donald Trump couldn’t pronounce words, insulted the faith of Jewish and Catholic Americans, lied about the election (again), lied about other stuff, bragged about repealing Roe, proposed cutting billions in education funding, announced he would appoint more extremist judges…“Revealed he planned to fill a second Trump term with more criminals like himself, attacked lawful voting, went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant – let alone be President of the United States.
“America can do better than the bitter, bizarre, and backward looking delusions of criminal Donald Trump.”
That’s pretty strong stuff.
SSACFT has always been extremely creepy in his attitude towards women but, looking back, it. is astonishing to me that his political opponents have been reluctant to use that word against him. The one memorable line that Joe Biden had in his June debate with SSACFT was when he accused him of having “the morals of an alley cat”.
That seems to be about to change. The Harris campaign is aided by the fact that there is no shortage of evidence that JD Vance is pretty weird and creepy too, which is why his sex-with-a-couch story caught fire in a way that would not have if it had been said of (say) Joe Biden.
It’s common for rumors about famous people that are objectively untrue but are funny or entertaining to go viral (a famous example suggests Glee actress Lea Michele secretly can’t read), whether started by intentional trolls, as was the case with Vance and the couch, or via games of digital telephone, where all context and factuality get left untranslated. Most of the time, the reason the rumors spread is because people genuinely want to believe them. In Vance’s case, the fact that he’d written a coming-of-age book meant that a common trope (teen boy tries to have sex with inanimate object) made some degree of sense, coupled with the fact that he’s espoused some extremely bizarre views on sex and gender.
…What’s more bizarre is that the couch joke was only one of the three most off-putting things Vance has been known for during his first 10 days as a VP nominee, and the only one that wasn’t verified as true. After Trump announced his pick on July 15, a clip from his 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson went viral in which he complained that the US was “effectively run” by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” naming Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children, and how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it,” he said, discounting Harris’s two step-children whom she co-parents with husband Doug Emhoff. Then, Vance tried and failed to get laughs at a Trump rally by making an awkward joke about drinking diet Mountain Dew and how “[Democrats] are going to call that racist.”
Vance already held extreme views on sex and gender; he opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest and has compared it to slavery. He has voted against a bill ensuring access to IVF and suggested a ban on porn. He called universal child care “a class war against normal people.” He opposes legislating codifying the right to gay marriage and suggested that people in “violent” marriages shouldn’t get divorced.
He is also among the nebulous group of young intellectual conservatives backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel loosely called the “New Right,” whose main project seems to be making techno-fascist and incel-adjacent ideas seem cool and edgy. On X, where Vance has spent a great deal of time, he at one point followed several white nationalist accounts, many of whom glorify bodybuilding and fascism while promoting the Great Replacement theory. He is, in other words, exactly the type of guy you could imagine claiming that couch sex robots were the beginning of a glorious future without women.
So what is going to replace “When they go low, we go high”? I don’t think it is going to be “When they go low, we go lower”. It is more likely to be something along the lines of “When they go low, we are going to point how what weird, sick creepy, freaks they are”.
Latest Harris campaign email:
"Trump is old and quite weird?"
— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) July 25, 2024
It isn’t slander if it is true.
And riffing off this other birgerjohansson comment, I also think that, if Trump doesn’t chicken out from a debate, Harris should have her laugh ready for when Trump lies or otherwise says something stupid.
I’d also like to hear lots of Democrats point out, repeatedly and correctly, that we won’t be doing much laughing for a long time if the Project2025 folks are allowed to be in charge.
I doubt that. Conservatives are very emotionally and intellectually prepared for mud fighting, it’s their bread and butter. Whether they have any good rebuttals to accusations that are perfectly true and correct remains to be seen.
@3 -- they’re prepared to dish it out. I don’t think they’re prepared to be on the receiving end…
Women and minorities have had to bear the burden of always appearing calm and forbearing no matter what abuse is being inflicted upon them. I’m pretty sure the phrase “When they go low…” arose out of 400 years of abuse or even death meted out instantly the moment the white men sensed any sort of emotion. It’s rife in the evangelical and Mormon sectors even now, where the women and children are trained to always appear joyful and submissive, lest their overlords take offense and abuse them with plumbing pipe (from “How to Train up a Child” by the Pearls). Both Obamas had to tread carefully lest they be seen as an “angry black person”.
But it’s been nearly 2 decades since Obama ran for President, and I for one am glad that Harris and her team are naming and shaming.
I read Hillbilly Elegy when it came out because I was urged to by someone who thought it was the best thing ever written (spoiler alert: it was not).
Why is JD Vance the way he is? Well, his biological father abandoned him and his mother before he got to know him. His mother was a druggie and floated in and out of his life. His grandparents who raised him got married in their teens and it was a violent, abusive marriage.
A different person might have sought therapy to work through these issues that shaped his character. Looks like Vance chose to learn the wrong lessons--make women slaves, no divorce allowed even in cases where the wife and kids are being abused.
Allegedly.
I clicked thru on xitter and scrolled down. The SSACFT picture in the airplane is a fake. (I used tineye)
Vance also said that people who had conceived children (not adopted) should get more votes: one vote for each child, which the parent(s) would cast. So, parents’ votes would count more than anyone else’s. Yeah, cause that’s democracy!
Trump topped Vance: he recently urged all his followers to vote, because “then we’ll fix it so that you’ll never have to vote again.” Well, at least he’s honest about it. The thing is, a lot of his followers actually would prefer a facist dictatorship to a modern liberal multicultural democracy. But, that’s kind of a big turn-off for all the rest of America.
So he wants to treat breeding like it’s some inviolate holy sacrament but thinks any sort of social safety net program promoting childcare is anathema? If you don’t care whether children lack care or food then why the fuck do you care whether a fetus is terminated in the womb? Is it just too fast? Does he need to know they’re suffering through starvation instead? What a disgusting moron.
It’s not about them, it’s about the women. He wants women to suffer if they don’t do the tradwife thing, i.e. be men’s unpaid domestic and sex servants and the unpaid daycare providers for their kids.
Restoring/upholding male supremacy is equally important to white supremacy in the GOP agenda.
bb:
Yeah, that’s what you imagine.
In your cluey manner.
(Naked assertions, they sure carry their weight!)
He is in favor of a total abortion ban, and has some truly unhinged opinions about the issue.
He has publicly advocated for prosecuting women who board aircraft provided by George Soros, to fly to a state where women’s reproductive choices aren’t being dictated by the state.
He sounds very like a denizen of the slymepit/4chan/Qanon crowd, or bog standard gamergate troll.
It’s no surprise that his approval ratings started in negative numbers and have only continued sinking.