Toxic masculinity is on the ballot

It’s no secret that former President Donald Trump’s campaign has been sputtering ever since Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race six weeks ago.

Down in most polls, Trump so clearly still wishes he was running against President Joe Biden — even writing fanfic on social media that his old nemesis will soon jump back in — and has yet to land on a clear strategy to defeat Harris. In fact, he’s even struggled to bestow a consistent nickname upon her, bouncing around between “Kamabla,” ‘Laffin’ Kamala” and “Comrade Kamala.”

When you cut through all the insults, meandering stories and off-color “jokes” from both Trump and his running mate, Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, their argument is this election should come down to Harris proving that she’s up to the job — and because she’s weak and dumb, she flunks that test.

The flip side is that Trump, of course, has nothing to prove — even though his presidency was an abject failure, aside from shoveling more tax cuts to billionaires. He prostrated himself to dictators like Vladimir Putin and made America a laughingstock; his slapdash, conspiratorial response to COVID doomed thousands to suffering and death; and he tried to instigate a coup to stay in power after he lost reelection, which ended with him becoming the only president to be impeached twice.

And Vance, who just turned 40 and hasn’t even served in the Senate for two years, doesn’t seem to believe he needs to show he’s qualified to be the VP for the oldest presidential nominee in history.

But at a rally in Big Rapids, Michigan last week, Vance had plenty of questions about Harris’ abilities, asking the crowd if she was the “vice president or the vice principal” while complaining that she’s too busy “whining,” “running on a fake joy” and “telling a joke” to demonstrate to Americans why they should promote her to the Oval Office.

Then Vance argued that there was no way for Harris to compete with Trump’s strength and vision for the country, so her only option for their upcoming debate was to “put on a navy suit, and long red tie and adopt a slogan, ‘Make America Great Again.’”

It’s obvious why Trump thinks Vance deserves to be a heartbeat away from the presidency and why both of them believe it’s preposterous for Harris to be the commander-in-chief, despite her long résumé as a prosecutor, California attorney general, U.S. senator and vice president.

It’s the ultimate identity politics argument: Presidenting is for men.

And Kamala Harris is a woman — and a woman of color (a “DEI hire,” as some Republicans have sneered just to put a fine point on it). Case closed.

Team Trump was already pushing that it was a “boys vs. girls election” back when Biden was still in the race. As Axios cringingly put it: “It’s Donald Trump’s chest-beating macho appeals vs. Joe Biden’s softer, reproductive-rights-dominated, all-gender inclusivity” — hence a Republican National Convention that featured ‘80s wrestling star Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt.

Now that Trump is running against a woman, he and Vance have just made the attacks more personal.

We saw Trump use this misogynistic playbook against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton back in 2016, when he slammed her as a “nasty woman” who “shouted” and lacked “the look” to be president. He also has a long history of disparaging Black women, in particular, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and U.S Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who he called “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”

Not surprisingly, Trump has repeatedly trashed Harris’ intelligence.

“I don’t think she’s a very bright person,” he said of the vice president late last month. “I do feel that. I mean, I think that’s right. I think I am a very bright person, and a lot of people say that.”

Trump also has been banging the drum that Harris is frail and feckless — even though he’s been the one trying to weasel out of debates — telling Fox News in July that world leaders would treat her “like a play toy.” That message has been reinforced by right-wing media figures like Jesse Watters, who mused if voters really want to “gamble the country away on a frightened woman.”

In a separate rant, Watters contended that “when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman” — which probably came as a shock to Republican men who have voted for MAGA faves like Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

Then there was Trump’s hostile performance at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference in July. He proclaimed that Harris, who is the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, just “happened to turn Black” in the middle of her career and asked, “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

Vance followed that up by trying to paint Trump’s crude racism as a clever line of attack. It’s perfectly legitimate to question Harris’ identity since she’s a “chameleon” and a “fundamentally fake person,” the senator told CNN.

Vance has undergone quite the metamorphosis himself, having gone from savaging Trump as “America’s Hitler” in 2016 to joining his ticket eight years later. But the one ideological throughline in his career has been his bizarre fixation on single women bucking their supposed biological imperative to reproduce.

“We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance said in his most well-known diatribe in 2021. “It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

As a rising progressive star, AOC is frequently and weirdly subjected to right-wing male ire, but Vance’s other two targets reveal an even deeper ugliness. Harris is the mother of two stepkids (who call her “Momala”) and Buttigieg and his husband actually adopted twins just days after Vance’s interview.

Running mates are typically the ticket’s attack dogs and that’s a role Vance has embraced with gusto. But his offputting, elitist delivery often falls flat, whether he’s speaking at campaign rallies or attempting to order doughnuts (in sharp contrast to Trump, who was still greeted by adoring fans at last week’s rally in Potterville).

Meanwhile, Harris’ VP pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has been the happy warrior, framing Trump and Vance in simple terms: “These guys are weird” (which has clearly gotten under Trump’s skin, as he won’t stop talking about it).

It’s little wonder why Walz — who returned over the weekend to one of his favorite places, the Minnesota State Fair, to jovially serve up ice cream to throngs of people — is so much more popular than Vance in the polls.

But Vance has kept at it, recently posting an old meme of teen beauty queen Caitlin Upton stumbling through an answer on geopolitics with the caption: “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.”

He refused to back down — even when an interviewer informed him that Upton had once considered suicide — because Vance, who worships at the altar of toxic masculinity, knows that apologies are weak.

No foray into misogyny would be complete without speculation about Harris’ attractiveness and sexual history, so naturally Trump has weighed in, oddly telling his supporters, “I am much better looking than her. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.”

Just a few days ago, he reposted a photo of Harris and Clinton, with the comment: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently …”

Right-wing media types have been more than happy to jump on the vulgar bandwagon, with Watters painting a disturbing picture of generals “hav[ing] their way” with Harris and Megyn Kelly accusing the VP of having “slept her way to the top.”

Harris, of course, is no shrinking violet. She’s spent four years as the president’s understudy on the world stage and was known for slicing and dicing Republicans during her days on the Judiciary Committee —  memorably leaving Brett Kavanaugh befuddled during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing and incensing Trump, who carped she was “extraordinarily nasty.”

No doubt, Trump and Vance assumed Harris couldn’t resist brawling with them over sexism and racism — and would come out looking weak, entitled and shrill to enough swing voters to turn the tide.

You could hardly blame Harris if she noted, for instance, that Vance appears to wear eyeliner to make his baby blues pop, while Trump squeezes into Spanx, all while they run on their macho MAGA platform.

But Harris has taken another tack. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked her last week about Trump ridiculing her racial identity at NABJ, the vice president dismissed it as “the same old tired playbook” and said, “Next question, please.”

Her message that the attack wasn’t even worthy of a response is powerful. Because if there’s one thing that Trump can’t abide, it’s being ignored. He’s devoted his entire life to ginning up media attention for whatever reason — real estate deals, bankruptcies, divorces, affairs, Trump steaks, even a board game — culminating with the most egocentric presidential campaigns we’ve ever seen.

But this is not a redux of Michelle Obama’s 2016 mantra of “when they go low, we go high.”

Consider Harris’ Democratic National Convention acceptance speech, when she declared, “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”

The vice president then detailed how Trump has been found guilty of fraud, liable for sexual abuse, tried to “throw away your votes” in 2020 and “sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol” rather than peacefully concede.

Harris relishes taking the fight to Trump. But like women who truly understand how to wield power, she insists on doing it on her own terms.