Since Sunday, when Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the electoral race, Republican Donald Trump’s campaign communications have included exaggerated photographs of the open laughter of Kamala Harris, the Republican’s probable new opponent. Trump renamed her a few weeks ago as Laffin’ (for laughing) Kamala, something like Kamala the Laughter, to highlight her grimaces and the histrionic character that they attribute to her, but the humor has given way to vitriol after replacing Biden as the potential candidate of the Democrats. “Kamala Harris is a joke as is Biden. Harris will be even WORSE [en mayúsculas en el original] to the people of our nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been Crooked Joe’s enabler-in-chief all along. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two. Harris must defend the failed Biden Administration, as well as his liberal, weak record on crime in the State of California” when she was attorney general, reads the latest Republican statement, released Sunday afternoon. The message revives the criticism that dogged her in the 2020 Democratic primaries, in which she was lambasted for supposedly being soft on crime and too lenient on small-time drug dealers.
During her tenure as attorney general, Harris also received criticism for failing to adequately investigate cases of police abuse and use of force. Trump’s re-election speech places great emphasis on the rule of law and order, as well as on illegal immigration, the entry of those supposed 20 million undocumented immigrants that Republicans attribute to the Biden Administration’s poor border management. As soon as he arrived at the White House, Biden tasked Harris in March 2021 with managing the immigration crisis, which has earned her the pejorative nickname of “border czarina” by Republicans, as well as absolute disqualification for what they consider to be her meager achievements. The month Harris received the assignment, 171,000 entries were recorded, the highest figure in 15 years, but this June the number of illegal crossings plummeted by 29% after the emergency measures adopted by the Democratic White House.
Harris, in short, is for the Republicans the necessary collaborator of Biden, as well as his accomplice. “Every single failure we have seen from Joe Biden – the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the border crisis, crushing inflation and a weakened United States abroad – have been disasters in the hands of Kamala Harris. Not only would Harris be a disaster in the White House, but she also helped Biden cover up his deteriorating health while in office, something that totally destroys her credibility,” says the first official statement. Arguments similar to those used by JD Vance, number two Trump: “For the last four years, she signed the open borders and green scam policies [la transición ecológica] “Biden’s failures that drove up the cost of housing and groceries,” Vance said Sunday, referring to inflation, which is also blamed on him. “She owns all of these failures.”
TV Ad in Key States
The offensive against Harris will include a campaign of television ads to discredit her management, both in the White House and previously, in California. MAGA Inc, the main Republican super PAC (Political Action Committee, in its English acronym) launched a new 30-second spot on Sunday, shared for the first time on social media, which previews the plan of attack. The ad, which will cost five million dollars to broadcast, insists that Harris “covered up Joe Biden’s obvious mental deterioration” and includes clips of the vice president praising the president’s management: “Our president is in good shape, in good health, tireless, vibrant, and I have no doubt about the strength of the work that we have done.”
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The group, which has so far spent $77 million on pro-Trump ads, plans to run anti-Harris ads in key battlegrounds: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania, four of the seven swing states that will determine the final outcome of the election. Calling Harris a puppet — a subordinate, vicarious role, probably because she is a woman — is the Republicans’ main trump card, now that Biden’s withdrawal deprives them of any compelling arguments: their best lines of attack, the president’s age and mental acuity, or lack thereof, are no longer useful to them and can also backfire (Trump is 78 years old and often does not finish his sentences).

It is therefore to be expected that Harris’s disqualification, if she is finally chosen as a candidate for the White House, will be based on factors other than politics, such as sex or race. As an introduction to the foreseeable avalanche of mockery from the campaign, social networks and extremist Telegram channels have been filled in recent hours with furious misogynistic and racist insults, coming from radical platforms. The extreme right has launched into demonizing Harris in a predatory way, pointing to her sexual life and her race, in addition to recovering old conspiracy theories to question her probable candidacy.
Harris scares the Republican Party because her defense of abortion rights allowed the Democrats a better than expected result in the 2022 midterm elections. Also because of her legal training, with which she could attack a convicted candidate like Trump, with two pending criminal proceedings, after his conviction for the Stormy Daniels case. Evidence of this fear is the Republican’s request to move the second debate between presidential candidates, in September, from the agreed-upon channel, ABC News, to the more friendly Fox News, a Republican mouthpiece. They do not want to give Harris the opportunity to shine, and, apart from accusing her of the chaos at the border and her alleged criminal leniency, they also reduce the political disagreement to personal criticism. Harris’s good-humored nature offers them plenty of material, such as TikTok videos full of quirky moments (from a cooking recipe to funny dances with her collaborators or a phrase that has already gone viral, “do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”).
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