Trump supporters resurrect sexist and racist tropes against Kamala Harris: ‘She slept her way to the top’

A campaign logo as offensive as it is false is circulating online: a “Harris 2024” in which the H is formed with the silhouette of a woman performing fellatio on a man. This is how explicit the sexist attacks have become just hours after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, making her the favorite to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. “Cumala,” “Kamalasutra”...The list of insulting nicknames that the most radical far right has come up with is endless, but there is something else: most of it is recycled material. As soon as Biden threw in the towel, the most MAGAesque members of the MAGA movement rushed to resurrect all the material with which they tried to sink Harris, without success, in the 2020 election. And one man fired the gun to start the race: Donald Trump.

”It’s really important at this historic moment that we label these narratives and lies as what they are: an attempt to undermine the public service of a powerful woman because of her gender, her background and her skin color,” said the anti-disinformation activist Nina Jankowicz of the American Sunlight Project, who conducted a study in 2021 on insults against politicians, in which Harris stood out as the most widely targeted. The pretext is usually the least important part of these operations of misinformation and dehumanization. But analyzing the most often-repeated falsehoods, that “she slept her way to the top” (which dates back to the 1990s), helps to understand the dynamics of these attacks and how, in general, they crystallize from the elites of political groups: the opinion leaders, the influencers with the biggest followings or, as is the case now, Trump himself.

On July 4, when the possibility that Harris might replace a weakened Biden was already being raised, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social that the vice president had run a very bad campaign in the past, and added: “But that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician! Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.” He was alluding to an old rumor, fueled during the 2020 campaign, that Harris began her career in the 1990s thanks solely to her sexual relations with Brown, then mayor of San Francisco; the rumor claimed they were having an affair while he was still married. A Reuters investigation debunked the hoax: Brown had been separated from his wife for 13 years and his relationship with Harris was perfectly public until they ended it in 1995.

But Trump knew what he was doing. One of the most classic (and most reliable) sexist stereotypes involving politics was back on the table: women do well by sexually conquering men. From that seed planted by the former Republican president, who has uttered all kinds of atrocities about Harris, the insults grew in tone, and even more so after Sunday’s announcement that Biden was withdrawing from the race, an analysis by Wired magazine shows. Manipulated images of Harris in the White House in sexually suggestive attitudes have started to circulate online, while right-wing influencers revel in this degrading narrative.

““She became Vice President because Biden needed a non-white female on the ticket. [...] She’s made a career out of begging for hand outs from powerful men,” the far-right activist Matt Walsh posted for 12 million users of the X network to see. One of Trump’s most toxic fans, Milo Yiannopoulos, has dedicated a string of tweets to “Cumala,” whom he asks how many abortions she has undergone because of her “sordid sexual history.”

Race, background, DEI

Harris is not the first woman to be accused of getting to her position through sex, nor will she be the first presidential candidate whose eligibility is questioned because of her background. It happened to Barack Obama, whom Trump himself accused of not being an American, but from Kenya. With Kamala, the racist falsehood is repeated and it is falsely said that her parents, from India and Jamaica, were not residents of the United States when she was born and did not have legal status. Who was one of the first people to spread this hoax in 2020? Again, Donald Trump.

For online trolls, Harris is not Black enough nor Indian enough to be considered the first Black Asian-American vice president. In fact, for some, she is not even a woman: one of the falsehoods that has haunted her for a long time is that she is a trans person. In 2020, they claimed that Harris could not have risen to a position of power without secretly being a man. They falsely claimed that she had been a man named ‘Kamal Aroush’ before the transition” Jankowicz explains.

Harris is also the perfect target for one of Republicans’ latest obsessions: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. “It’s a great example of DEI. We’re talking about a person who … has a skin color, but skin color does not … denote merit, does not denote competency, and she is a very incompetent person,” said Republican Congressman Burgess Owens. A Fox talk show host, Charles Gasparino, wrote an article in the New York Post titled: “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris.”

Jankowicz is clear about the reason for all this: users who interact with the denigrating narrative against Harris are more likely to engage in other harassment and misinformation campaigns. This expert notes that misinformation and gender-based abuse, occurring on both sides of the political spectrum, undermine women’s participation in public life. Sexist and anti-feminist misinformation has been strong since the assassination attempt on Trump: the attack has been held up as proof that women should not be part of security forces.

The queen of memes

The efforts to attack Kamala Harris on social media has an added explanation: she is the queen of memes. Her extroverted nature, her loud laughter and her unexpected remarks are the perfect fishing grounds for a generation that turns everything into memes. Perhaps it is not all ideological, the analysts concede: it is simply entertaining to young people. An anecdote Harris told about her mother talking about “falling out of a coconut tree” has been generating endless memes and remixes for a few days now.

Harris also has her own highly motivated army of followers on social media who call themselves the K-Hive and are capable of not only defending her, but also generating punishment campaigns against her rivals. They have already launched a counterattack, resurfacing a 2020 ad that said of her: “She Prosecuted Sex Predators. He Is One.” In any case, there is no doubt that the vice president generates engagement (clicks, comments and visibility), which has always been one of the strengths of her Republican rival. Now, Trump is the old man and Harris has new generations of voters watching her videos with a smile.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition