Donald Trump's Sexist, Conspiratorial Obsession With Kamala Harris Stealing the Presidency
LatestAt a campaign rally in Wisconsin, Trump once again pointed his vitriol at Sen. Kamala Harris, musing on the rapture that would certainly ensue if she became the first woman president. “If a woman is going to become the first president of the United States, it can’t be her,” Trump said, speaking from a hypothetical future in which not only is Joe Biden is dead but there has never been any other president in the history of the United States. “That would rip our country apart.”
Once again, it’s worth noting that Harris hasn’t been running for president for many months and is on Biden’s ticket as a vice president. Facts schmacts! Misinterpretation of history aside, Trump and the far Right’s obsession with a Harris presidency is growing more frantic as election day draws nigh.
In his constant imaginings of the death of Joe Biden, Trump isn’t so much wishing ill against his enemy but fixating on how badly he’d much rather be going up against Harris, an opponent he can just stalk across a debate stage. Trump’s hyperbolic rant about Harris somehow conniving to steal the Oval Office through a “backdoor,” as Trump put it, has been an echoing conspiracy this week. It sprung from Harris making a mistake while speaking when on Monday, at a campaign stop in Arizona, Harris accidentally referenced to a future Harris administration, and the right seized on the slip up as if it were a sex scandal admission.
Trump probably isn’t talking about a world where Biden survives, gets elected, and then dies, with Harris entering the office via the chain of command the vice presidency is designed to fulfill.
In the right’s perception, Kamala is somehow skipping ahead over hundreds of years of racial oppression, thousands of years of sexism, and several months of a presidential campaign to ascend the American throne. She’s going the easy way to secure the presidency while Trump took the hard route—campaigning and losing the popular vote. Now he’s back to having to campaign once more and has lost all interest in doing so, and is content to skip over of the very much alive Joe Biden, in favor of a woman he sees as his weaker link.
“Because it’s her,” Trump said in his rant, emphasizing that the American people didn’t want a Harris presidency. (Forget about the fact that the American people at large didn’t exactly want a Trump one.) Is it Harris’s gender, or her liberal politics, or her race, or her person that voters must find so deplorable in Trump’s mind? It’s unclear, but Trump is willing to throw it all at the wall and see what sticks. The idea that her succession to the presidency would tear this country apart is just another red flag signaling Trump’s disdain for electoral politics. Should Biden and Harris win, it’s a huge possibility Harris will have to shove her fresh Timbs all the way up Trump’s asshole to get him out of the Oval Office in the first place.