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brooklynite

(96,882 posts)
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 08:22 AM Oct 2020

Trump intensifies focus on Harris in final weeks of campaign

AP News

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Grasping for a comeback, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are intensifying their focus not on Democratic nominee Joe Biden, but on his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris — arguing without evidence that it’s Harris, the first Black woman on a major party ticket, who would really be in charge if Democrats win the White House.

The effort is laced with sexist and racist undertones, and one that is aimed at winning back Republicans and independents who are comfortable with Biden’s more moderate record, but may associate Harris with Democrats’ left flank, despite her own more centrist positions on some major issues.

During the past week, Trump told Sean Hannity of Fox News that Harris would assume the presidency within “three months” of Biden’s inauguration. During a conversation with Rush Limbaugh, he warned that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would “replace” Biden with Harris. And the president called her a “monster” during an interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business.

Trump’s focus on Harris is building as he tries to regain an advantage against Biden, who is leading most national and battleground state polls three weeks before the election. Trump has long sowed doubt about Biden’s fitness for the job, but is especially eager to shift attention after contracting the novel coronavirus and confronting his own health scare.


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beachbumbob

(9,263 posts)
1. I sure hope he keeps his focus on a Black and Female VP as that will surely bring him more black and
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 08:24 AM
Oct 2020

female votes, right?

ProudMNDemocrat

(20,898 posts)
2. The more Trump attacks a woman, the more women will ABANDON him....
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 08:35 AM
Oct 2020

Except the ones too stupid enough to wear t-shirts that say "Trump can grab my _________ ."

[img][/img]

Trump can have these women.

Botany

(77,324 posts)
3. Arguing without evidence that it's Harris, who would really be in charge if Democrats win.
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 08:36 AM
Oct 2020

And this is bad how?

ProudMNDemocrat

(20,898 posts)
4. Trump did not like the way Kamala Harris demasculated Mike Pence...
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 08:48 AM
Oct 2020

I mean, Kamala neutered Pence before millions of people watching the VP debate.

Trump is figuring that if he viscously attacks Kamala, that will endear him to the Educated, suburban, and Independent women. Trump is wagering his money on the wrong woman. Women as a voting bloc, are through with Trump. Except for those few too stupid to think for themselves.

Botany

(77,324 posts)
7. Kamala was like, "Do you want some more rope to hang yourself with Mr. Vice President?"
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 09:04 AM
Oct 2020

Senator Harris' resume: she was an assistant D.A. in Alameda, County, an assistant D.A. in San Francisco, the D.A. of
San Francisco, the A.G. of the State of California, and now a US Senator.

It was almost unfair but she knew when Pence was looking bad or lying and let him have the stage.

bullwinkle428

(20,662 posts)
5. Birtherism worked for him the first time, so he figures that he might
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 08:50 AM
Oct 2020

as well use a "birtherism-adjacent" theme in this campaign.

ProudMNDemocrat

(20,898 posts)
8. It will not work....
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 09:08 AM
Oct 2020

Women, POC, New Naturalized citizens, other ethnic groups are not going to take too kindly on Trump attacking one of their own per se. A woman of African-Jamaican-Indian descent.

A true melting pot of culture. If anything, women are going to revolt.

BumRushDaShow

(169,761 posts)
10. "but may associate Harris with Democrats' left flank"
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 09:20 AM
Oct 2020

Harris is definitely not Ocasio-Cortez in terms of policy positions.

But here is the ROOT and SOURCE of the GOP problem - infesting the GOP since the early '90s -

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally, is pushing the president to make Harris a campaign centerpiece.

“If voters understand the totality of her radicalism, they would conclude that she would be a very high-risk person to put in the White House,” Gingrich said.

He went on to call Biden “docile” and Harris “aggressive.”

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-virus-outbreak-race-and-ethnicity-joe-biden-donald-trump-699355ac17282f49187ed00eb0d02404


He is the one who has manifested the current "in your face" attack strategy that the GOP has embraced and has utilized more and more since 1994, culminating in the current furious frenzy of a flock of foaming-at-the-mouth freaks.

I had linked to an article in another thread not long ago, where this conduct of his was described via an interview - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/

The Man Who Broke Politics

Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue
Politics

Updated on October 17, 2018

[snip]

On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution. “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”

For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it. The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta.

The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.” But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”

[snip]

Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. “My idea was to work within the committee structure, take care of my district, and just pay attention to the legislative process,” Livingston told me. “But Newt came in as a revolutionary.” For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.

Voltaire2

(15,377 posts)
11. Scary woman of color in leggings!
Tue Oct 13, 2020, 09:38 AM
Oct 2020

It will play well to his nazi base. I guess he needs to shore up that 30%.

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