Far-right communities online are already demonizing Vice President Kamala Harris after speculation that she may replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in the US election.
But rather than focusing on her policies, experience, or ability to do the job, the vicious attacks have focused instead on her sex life, her race, and rethreading old conspiracies about her eligibility to be president.
These attacks have been spurred on by former President Donald Trump. “He just quit, you know—he’s quitting the race,” Trump said of Biden, in a video first reported by the Daily Beast last week and subsequently posted by Trump to his Truth Social account. “That means we have Kamala,” Trump adds. “She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic. She’s so fucking bad.”
On July 4, Trump posted about Harris on Truth Social. “She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician!” he wrote. “Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.”
Trump’s comments referenced Harris’ relationship with Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, in the mid-1990s. Though right-wing critics have accused her of having an affair with Brown because he was married at the time, a Reuters fact check from 2020 outlines how Brown had been separated from his wife for a decade before he began dating Harris.
The White House pushed back against Trump’s attacks. “I think it’s gross, I think it’s disturbing,” Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday. “She should be respected in the role that she has as vice president. She should be respected like any other vice president before her who was in that room. It is appalling that, I’m going to be careful here, that a former president is saying that about a current vice president. And we should call that out—it is not OK.”
But after Trump’s comments, the former president’s supporters and far-right figures quickly began to attack Harris.
Harris has served in elected office for decades as a district attorney, state attorney general, senator, and vice president. Still, the vast majority of the attacks were both racist and sexist, and made some reference to her performing sexual acts and insinuating that they had to do with her success.
“Kamala is just as brain dead as Biden,” far-right troll Laura Loomer wrote on X on Wednesday. “She pretends to be black, she has a documented history of giving blowjobs to Willie Brown to climb the ladder, and she’s obsessed with killing babies.”
“Willi Brown’s F–k toy makes good,” one member of the extremist message board The Donald wrote in response to a post about her possibly replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Far-right posters also suggested that her race has played a major role in her success.
“This is why DEI is particularly dangerous: idiots like her are lifted up above far smarter people so she starts to believe she’s the smartest one in the room,” a member of The Donald wrote last week.
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