Kamala Harris, Donald Trump race to redefine each other

Washington, July 29  In their first week of head-to-head match, Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee for US President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tried to define the race and each other in their own terms. Harris framed it as a fight between a “prosecutor and a convicted felon”, referring to her previous career as a prosecutor in California and Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records. She has lately used an adjective for Trump that has gone viral with the Democrats — ‘weird’.

Her campaign has also underscored Trump’s age — 78, 19 years older than Harris. Trump has not settled on any specific line of attack, phrase, or name yet, and has been testing an entire range of them at his rallies. He has called Harris “Low IQ”, “A bum”, a “Failed Vice-President”, and “Crazy liberal”. The former President has also mispronounced her name, which has been seen as an attempt to emphasise her foreign origins — mother from India, father from Jamaica — and mocked her laughter. Trump likes to brand his rivals with derogatory names. He has continued to call President Joe Biden “Crooked Joe” and “Sleepy Joe” and former rival for President Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary”. He called Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, 2016 rivals for the Republican nomination, “Low-energy Jeb” and “Little Marco”; and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas”, to mock her claims to American-Indian ancestry. Last week was the first for the two campaigns to confront each other head-to-head.

Trump’s campaign had been focused on President Biden until July 21, but Biden’s exit from the race took away a whole chunk of the Trump campaign’s playbook — framing the President as too old and with serious questions about his mental acuity. Harris’ elevation to the Democratic ticket had caught the Trump campaign by surprise, although it has claimed it was prepared. It is racing against time to frame a line of attack that will strike a chord with not only the Republican base, but also independent voters in swing states which will ultimately determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential elections as they did in every election cycle in the past. “This November, the American people are going to reject Kamala Harris’ crazy liberal extremism in a massive landslide,” Trump said at a rally in Minnesota on Saturday. Just hours before, he told a Bitcoin conference in Tennessee, “The people in this room are high IQ individuals. I’m running against a low IQ individual.”

At a rally in Florida last Friday, the former President said, “She was a bum three weeks ago. She was a bum. A failed Vice President in a failed administration.” Trump will settle on a line of attack that works for him, but until then, he will try new lines and names. The Harris campaign, on the other hand, found and broadcast its main line of attack from the word go. “I took on predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheats who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said in her first election speech the day after Biden quit the race and endorsed her to replace him on the ticket. “So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.” Her campaign calls Trump a “78-year-old convicted felon” in press statements.

Increasingly now, Harris and her campaign are using the adjective “weird” for Trump as a person and his actions, and for his running mate J.D. Vance. “Trump is old and quite weird,” the campaign said in a statement last week headlined ‘Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance’. At a fundraiser in Massachusetts, she described comments made about her by Trump and Vance as “just plain weird”. The Harris campaign also slammed Vance’s remarks to a TV channel as a “weird night” in a statement on Sunday.