Afunny thing happened in the hours after the exit of Joe Biden from the US presidential race and the entrance of Kamala Harris in his place: a huge and genuine surge of excitement for a candidate who had previously failed to inspire. This wasn’t just expediency. In the 48 hours after Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, donations came in amounting to more than $100m and there was a reported 700% rise in voter registrations. It was overwhelming and igniting; the feeling that this was someone who could actually win.
The oddest thing about this – apart from the ongoing sense of history happening in real time – was the lightning speed of the adjustment. It was like looking at a Magic Eye picture or a drawing by MC Escher. Superficially, nothing about Harris had changed since her abortive run for president in 2020. She was still prone to moments of awkwardness. It was still unclear entirely where her politics lay. Held up against the drama of Biden’s agonising exit, however, Harris’s relative youth, energy and sheer coherence made one want to clap for joy. For reasons that, four years ago, made many of those on the left suspicious of Harris, the 59-year-old suddenly looks a lot like the perfect candidate to fight and defeat Donald Trump.
Certainly Trump’s team caught this vibe and the scramble to counter it has been pure comedy gold, featuring a lot of people running around trying to find bad words for a lady politician. Within days of Harris’s ascent, Trump was calling her “crazy”, “nuts” and “dumb,” an auto-response that even his supporters at the back might be starting to twig is a generic line of attack. Trump’s surrogates, meanwhile, floundered in similar style. When John Kennedy, a Republican senator for Louisiana, referred to Harris on Fox News this week as “a bit of a ding-dong” – American for silly woman – the remark was so embarrassing that even the Fox host felt obliged to push back.
These attacks will inevitably narrow and personalise. But on the evidence of the first 10 days of Harris’s candidacy, the Republican machine is struggling to find a workable way to undermine her. JD Vance, a man so palpably unappealing that he seems to have spooked even those who think that Trump is a good thing, had this week to defend remarks he made several years ago attacking Harris for not having children. (She is the stepmother of two.)
There are circumstances in which this kind of mockery still works, but it doesn’t work here, and Vance, at 39, looked properly absurd – like a Victorian hologram poised to break out the word “spinster” – for making a song and dance about motherhood.
And while Harris has, to date, not been a particularly assured politician, she seems to know instinctively how to handle Trump. With a smirk that does more work than all of Clinton or Warren’s earnest attempts to debate him, Harris meets Trump at the demotic level and states the bleeding obvious: “These guys are weird.” It works because it’s true, but also because she’s doing the thing Trump hates above all other things: she’s laughing at him.
