Far-right online communities are already demonizing Vice President Kamala Harris following speculation she could replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. American elections.
But rather than focusing on his policies, his experience or his ability to do the job, the vicious attacks have instead focused on his sex life, his race and the revival of old conspiracies about his eligibility to run for president.
Those attacks were encouraged by former President Donald Trump. “He just gave up, you know, he’s giving up the race,” Trump said of Biden, in a video first reported by the The Daily Beast Last week, Trump posted a photo of himself on his Truth Social account. “That means we have Kamala,” Trump added. “She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic. She’s so bad.”
On July 4, Trump posted an article about Harris on Social truth“She had a bad run in the Democratic nomination process, starting at number two, getting defeated and dropping out, before she even got to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘very talented’ politician!” he wrote. “Just ask her mentor, the great Willie Brown of San Francisco.”
Trump’s comments were a reference to Harris’ relationship with Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, in the mid-1990s. Although right-wing critics have accused her of having an affair with Brown because he was married at the time, a Reuters fact-checked in 2020 describes how Brown was separated from his wife for a decade before he began dating Harris.
The White House hit back at Trump’s attacks. “I think it’s rude, I think it’s disturbing,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. told reporters “She should be respected in her role as vice president. She should be respected like every other vice president before her who was in this room. It’s appalling, I’m going to be careful here, for a former president to say that about a current vice president. And we should denounce it, it’s not acceptable.”
But after Trump’s comments, supporters of the former president and far-right figures quickly began attacking Harris.
Harris held elected office for decades as a district attorney, state attorney general, senator and vice president. Yet the vast majority of the attacks were both racist and sexist, and referred to sexual acts she performed and implied they were connected to her success.
“Kamala is as brain dead as Biden,” far-right troll Laura Loomer wrote on X on Wednesday. “She pretends to be black, she gave Willie Brown blowjobs to climb the ranks, and she’s obsessed with killing babies.”
“Willi Brown’s F–k toy feels good,” wrote one member of the extremist forum The Donald in response to a post suggesting she might replace Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Far-right posters have also suggested that his race played a major role in his success.
“This is why DEI is particularly dangerous: idiots like her are placed above much smarter people, so she starts to believe she is the smartest one in the room,” wrote one member of The Donald last week.
