Trump's deranged response to Kamala Harris being tapped for VP shows why it was such a smart pick 12AUG20

This is just the beginning of the misogynic, bigoted, racist, hateful lies that will bevome the theme of the drumpf / trump-pence campaign. This report from Mother Jones.....

Trump's deranged response to Kamala Harris being tapped for VP shows why it was such a smart pick

Yesterday, Joe Biden made it official: His vice presidential pick is Kamala Harris. Jamilah King, who has been covering Sen. Harris for years, zeroed in on what Harris brings to the ticket:

Harris offers that rare combination of relative youth (she’s 55) and real experience in public office. And it’s this experience—once a liability—that makes her uniquely positioned to speak with authority on how and why law enforcement has been at odds with Black communities. There’s also one more reality that can’t be discounted: She’s a Black woman of Jamaican and Indian descent, once deemed “the female Barack Obama.” In these times of hyperpartisan bickering and a ratcheting up of the culture wars by Trump, identity and representation matter. Don’t forget it’s also this life experience that she’ll bring to the position—one that should, and will, inform policy.

And though it was widely expected that he would select Harris, the Trump campaign seems to have been relatively unprepared. Tim Murphy took a look at the initial press releases from the Trump campaign and they aren't great!

In its incoherent response to Harris, the Trump campaign is merely echoing its incoherent response thus far to Biden. The campaign has spent much of the summer running ads attacking the former vice president for being soft on crime. Biden, they charge, will surrender American cities to radical mobs and defund the police. “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” the ads say. The scary images that flashed on the screen, of course, depicted Trump’s America, which the rest of the world considers so scary US citizens are currently banned from Canada. Except…the Trump campaign is also running ads highlighting Biden’s role in drafting the 1994 crime bill. The law “destroyed millions of Black lives,” Trump’s ads say.

Taken separately, Trump’s criminal justice–themed messaging has a certain logic. His campaign wants to win back white independents and moderate Republicans who over the past four years have been abandoning the party, particularly in suburbs. And, because in the president’s mind, it is always New York City in the 1980s, he’s convinced that the way to do it is through racist appeals about crime. But his campaign also wants to depress turnout among Black voters and young activists and believes that one way to accomplish that is to sow doubts about Biden’s commitment to reform—something it tried against Hillary Clinton in 2016. But running these messages at the same time, and even in the same sentence, simply telegraphs the unseriousness of the effort: After three and a half years in office, with 82 days until the election, the only strategy Trump can truly commit to is not having one.

And if you're curious how the president himself responded to the selection, the answer is...bad. As Abigail Weinberg details:

Taking a softball question from a New York Post reporter, Trump resorted to playing his hits: calling a woman in a position of power “nasty.”

“She was extraordinarily nasty to Kavanaugh,” he said. “She was nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing.”

Besides being explicitly sexist, Trump’s focus on the Kavanaugh hearing was a non sequitur. The Post reporter had lobbed him a question about marijuana and Harris’ record on prosecutions—easy bait that Trump ignored.

But the fun didn't end there. Today, Trump was back at it with, in the words of Inae Oh, "a generous serving of the racism and sexism we’ve long seen from this president."

Elsewhere, Rebecca Leber dived into Harris' climate record:

Her addition to Team Biden will focus a new spotlight on an issue Harris has championed in the Senate: addressing the racism of environmental pollution.

While climate change has grown in importance to Democratic voters in recent years, so has drawing the connection to racial injustices. We’re only now starting to reckon with a long history of white environmentalists and leaders chronically overlooking this crisis. And the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown Americans, is making the stakes clearer than ever—and makes addressing the pollution in these communities all the more urgent.

And Kevin Drum noted one group that is thrilled with the selection: Silicon Valley.

How do you feel about the pick? Jazzed? Less than jazzed? 

See you on the flip side,

—Ben Dreyfuss