Far-right online communities are already demonizing Vice President Kamala Harris after speculation that she could replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate in the US election.
But rather than focusing on her policies, her experience or her ability to do the job, the vicious attacks have centered on her sex life, her race and reviving old conspiracies about her eligibility to be president.
These attacks have been incited by former President Donald Trump. “He just quit, you know, he’s dropping out of the race,” Trump said of Biden, in a video first reported by the site Daily Beast last week and subsequently posted by Trump on his Truth Social account. “That means we have Kamala,” Trump adds. “She is so bad. She is so pathetic. She is so fucking bad.”
On July 4, Trump posted about Harris on Social Truth“She didn’t fare well in the Democratic nomination process, starting in second place and ending up defeated and dropping out of the race even before reaching Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t a ‘very talented’ politician,” he wrote. “Just ask her mentor, San Francisco great Willie Brown.”
Trump’s comments referenced Harris’s relationship with Brown, a 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 Check 2020 describes how Brown had been separated from his wife for a decade before he began dating Harris.
The White House responded to Trump’s attacks. “I think it’s disgusting, I think it’s disturbing,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary. He told reporters Friday. “She should be respected in the role that she has as vice president. She should be respected just like every other vice president who was in that room before her. It’s 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’s not right.”
But after Trump’s comments, supporters of the former president and far-right figures quickly began attacking 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 racist and sexist, referencing her sexual acts and suggesting that they played a role in her success.
“Kamala is as brain dead as Biden,” far-right troll Laura Loomer wrote on X on Wednesday. “She pretends to be black, has a documented history of performing oral sex on Willie Brown to move up the ranks, and is obsessed with killing babies.”
“Willi Brown’s f–k toy is a hit,” wrote one member of the extremist message board The Donald in response to a post about her possible replacement for Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Far-right posters also suggested that his race had played a role in his success.
“This is why DEI is particularly dangerous: morons like her are elevated above much smarter people, so she starts to believe she is the smartest one in the room,” one Donald insider wrote last week.
