'Flags I', obra do artista pop americano Jasper Johns
Disputa na próxima terça pode levar ordem internacional a cenário de fragmentação e incerteza
Carlos Gustavo Poggio
[RESUMO] Eleição presidencial nos Estados Unidos, na
próxima terça (5/11), talvez seja as mais decisiva e impactante da
história do país. Caso vitorioso, Donald Trump voltaria ao poder com o
Partido Republicano totalmente submisso às suas vontades e uma Suprema
Corte mais favorável, o que lhe daria carta branca para implementar
agenda mais extremada que abalaria a ordem global. A democrata Kamala
Harris, por sua vez, representa uma esquerda que, emparedada pela
polarização, oferece uma continuidade frágil do sistema, sem força para
renovação.
No célebre romance gótico, Victor Frankenstein,
um jovem cientista ambicioso, decide desafiar as leis da natureza. Ele
reúne pedaços de corpos e, em um experimento ousado, dá vida a uma
criatura que, em vez de glória, lhe traz horror.
Incapaz de encarar sua criação, Frankenstein a abandona, deixando-a à
própria sorte. Rejeitada e amargurada, a criatura se torna vingativa,
voltando-se contra o próprio criador e destruindo tudo o que ele ama.
Sem controle ou direção, o monstro representa o pesadelo de uma ambição
que, uma vez solta, não pode mais ser contida.
Donald Trump parece o monstro do romance de Mary Shelley,
reanimado com pedaços de ideologias que pareciam mortas na realidade
americana, como o protecionismo, o nacionalismo e o autoritarismo.
Em 2016, ele foi levado ao centro do Partido Republicano
para revitalizar uma base desiludida e recuperar um eleitorado que se
sentia esquecido. Todavia, como na história de Shelley, essa criatura
logo se mostrou difícil de controlar.
No início, muitos republicanos olharam com horror para a sua retórica
agressiva e para o desprezo que ele demonstrava pelas normas do
partido. Ainda assim, acreditavam que poderiam moderá-lo e que figuras
tradicionais do partido —como o líder no Senado, Mitch McConnell— seriam
capazes de mantê-lo dentro dos limites institucionais.
Durante o governo Trump, os avanços mais evidentes aconteciam nos
temas em que havia convergência de sua agenda com a de McConnell, como
na questão de cortes de impostos. Em outras questões, no entanto, como
as relações comerciais com a China e o enfraquecimento da Otan, o
Congresso e indivíduos em sua própria administração atuaram como freios,
contendo o alcance de suas políticas.
O vice-presidente Mike Pence tornou-se uma ilustração clara desses freios: no último ato de seu governo, Pence cumpriu a Constituição e certificou a vitória de Joe Biden,
desafiando os desejos de Trump e reforçando a autoridade das
instituições americanas. Esse episódio emblemático destacou como, mesmo
no auge de seu poder, Trump ainda era limitado pelas normas e lideranças
tradicionais.
Com o tempo, os criadores de Trump foram sendo afastados, derrotados
ou silenciados, enquanto ele consolidava seu poder. Hoje, a criatura
está solta —o velho Partido Republicano, morto e enterrado, deu lugar a
uma entidade nova, moldada à imagem de Trump, sem amarras ou controle.
McConnell e outros líderes republicanos
tradicionais foram marginalizados, aposentados ou ajustaram suas
carreiras para apoiar Trump incondicionalmente, como é o caso do senador
Lindsey Graham. Trump tornou-se não apenas o líder do partido, mas o
próprio partido, e, com isso, ganhou carta branca para conduzir uma
agenda mais extrema e menos institucionalmente moderada.
Enquanto os republicanos passavam por essa transformação, o Partido
Democrata seguiu uma trajetória mais conservadora, e Kamala Harris, sua candidata à Vice-Presidência em 2020,
foi escolhida mais por conveniência política, para atender a demandas
identitárias e aplacar a ala mais progressista da sigla, do que por uma
base de apoio própria.
Kamala representa uma esquerda que, diante da polarização e do avanço
da direita populista, se vê forçada a proteger a ordem existente, mais
do que impulsionar mudanças profundas. Essa curiosa dinâmica, uma
direita revolucionária e uma esquerda conservadora, coloca os EUA em um
cenário de incerteza global.
Se Trump for eleito, seu estilo insurgente e sua rejeição aos
compromissos internacionais tradicionais abalarão ainda mais a ordem
global, criando um vácuo de liderança que potências rivais, como China e
Rússia, estarão prontas para ocupar.
A Suprema Corte, que tradicionalmente servia como um contrapeso ao
Poder Executivo, agora reforça sua autoridade, como ficou claro na
decisão que declarou Trump imune a ações legais por medidas tomadas
durante sua Presidência, consolidando ainda mais sua proteção contra as
consequências de suas próprias ações. O republicano se tornaria uma
figura ainda mais volátil, com menos compromissos para com seu próprio
partido e mais propenso a governar conforme seus impulsos.
A escolha do senador J.D. Vance como
seu candidato a vice em 2024 foi a primeira pista. Em 2016, ter Mike
Pence como seu companheiro de chapa representava uma estratégia
calculada: aproximar-se do eleitorado evangélico, um dos pilares do
Partido Republicano, que via Trump com desconfiança.
Pence, um conservador firme e respeitado, oferecia uma garantia de
que a administração de Trump teria um vínculo com a base do partido e
com a ideologia republicana clássica. Desta vez, o critério determinante
para a escolha do vice foi claro: lealdade incondicional a Trump.
Vance, mais do que qualquer outro, representa uma nova elite republicana
que emergiu para servi-lo, não ao partido.
Essa mudança revela uma lição aprendida por Trump ao longo de seus
quatro anos na Casa Branca: ele agora valoriza a obediência absoluta
sobre qualquer qualidade ideológica ou credibilidade eleitoral.
Com um partido moldado à sua imagem e lideranças que priorizam a
lealdade acima de tudo, Trump se vê liberado de praticamente qualquer
contenção interna. Esse cenário, de um presidente que opera sem freios
institucionais e com um vice leal apenas à sua figura, configura uma
nova dinâmica de poder com impactos que transcendem as fronteiras dos
Estados Unidos.
As consequências para a ordem internacional são profundas, pois a
política externa americana, sob um eventual novo governo Trump, tenderia
a ser ditada por interesses imediatos e isolacionistas, abandonando
compromissos históricos e deixando aliados à própria sorte. Essa mudança
não só ameaça a estabilidade das alianças tradicionais, como também
abre espaço para o avanço de potências rivais.
Trump, ao longo de sua carreira política, nunca escondeu seu desdém pela Otan
e por alianças multilaterais em geral. Seu isolacionismo em 2024
representa um enfraquecimento ativo da aliança militar que, desde 1949,
tem sido um pilar da segurança transatlântica.
Uma reeleição de Trump certamente levaria países europeus a
questionar a confiança na proteção americana, acelerando um processo de
militarização independente na Europa. Na prática, a Otan deixaria de ser a aliança coesa que tem sido,
transformando-se em um bloco de países com agendas menos sincronizadas e
mais suscetíveis à influência de poderes externos, como Rússia e China.
Este contraste define o cenário de 2024: enquanto Trump encarna uma
direita que rompe com a tradição e busca uma mudança radical, Kamala
simboliza uma esquerda que tenta preservar o sistema.
No entanto, mesmo que ela saia vitoriosa, a sombra de Trump e a força
das ideias que ele representa continuarão presentes. O republicano se
tornou um exemplo para outros países sobre a volatilidade da política
americana e a permanência de ideais nacionalistas e protecionistas, que
demonstraram ter ressonância profunda. Para aliados e rivais, a ascensão
do trumpismo como forca política evidencia que os Estados Unidos podem
não ser mais o pilar de estabilidade que historicamente pretendiam ser.
O
monstro que o Partido Republicano ajudou a criar ameaça agora não só o
sistema político americano, mas também a estrutura da ordem
internacional. A vitória de Kamala pode oferecer uma estabilidade
temporária, mas sua influência é limitada e insuficiente para conter a
desestabilização gerada por um afastamento contínuo dos EUA do papel
tradicional de liderança global.
O trumpismo provou que as fundações da política americana são menos
sólidas do que muitos imaginavam —e essa incerteza é o novo alicerce
sobre o qual as relações internacionais terão de se reequilibrar.
In October 2020, on the morning after Kamala Harris had debated
then vice-president Mike Pence, Donald Trump would not say her name.
Calling in to Fox Business from the White House, he referred to her as
“this monster that was onstage with Mike Pence.” The choice of this term
was not accidental—he repeated it for emphasis.
Even by Trump’s
standards of vituperation, there is something strangely excessive about
this verbal assault on a woman who posed little direct threat to his
reelection. Typically, his insults are literal takedowns. The target is
belittled (Mini Mike Bloomberg, Little Marco Rubio, Little Rocket Man
Kim Jong-un) or rendered weak and infantile (Low Energy Jeb Bush, Low IQ
Maxine Waters, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer). Even Trump’s opponent in that
election, Joe Biden, was diminished to Sleepy Joe—Sleepy, of course, is
also one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs.
Choosing to (as Shakespeare
might have it) “be-monster” Harris meant going against this grain.
Instead of cutting Harris down, he was talking her up, inflating her
into a Medusa, a Scylla, a Grendel. And in the current campaign, he has
returned to this magnification of her malevolence, making Harris a
sourer of American lives. Trump increasingly conjoins the monster Harris
with the monster alien immigrants who are, in the dark hallucination he
wants to engender, streaming across the southern border to invade
American homes and murder and rape their occupants. On September 29, at a
rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, he told his followers that Harris “should
be impeached and prosecuted for her actions. And these killers are
stone-cold monsters and have so little heart. They have no heart.”
In
a Truth Social post on September 27, based on a wild distortion of
figures that in fact refer to a forty-year period (including Trump’s own
years in office), he wrote that “Comrade Kamala Harris…allowed almost
14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country…. And people are dying every day because of her. SHE HAS GOT BLOOD ON HER HANDS!”
For many of Trump’s biblically inclined followers, this surely evokes
the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation: “And I saw the woman
drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs
of Jesus.”
Trump identifies Harris completely with her rampaging army of killers. In his telling she is
them, their actions are hers, and together they create a monstrosity
beyond his audience’s collective imagination: “These are rough, vicious,
rougher than anything you can imagine.” Trump casts Harris in a horror
movie that no moviemaker could ever put on screen: “If you wanted to do a
movie, there’s no actor in Hollywood that could play the role. There’s
nobody that could do it…. But it’s all because Kamala let these people
in.” It seems unlikely that Trump has read Immanuel Kant, but here he is
enacting Kant’s idea of the sublime as a mix of pleasure and
displeasure “arising from the inadequacy of imagination.” He is both
thrilling and terrifying his followers.
Trump fires at Harris the
familiar missiles of sexist abuse: nasty, dumb, lying, crazy, “mentally
disabled.” But there is something more visceral in his conjuring of a
female fiend. It is dredged from the depths of a specifically political
strain of misogyny: the horror of the woman ruler. It harks back to the
sixteenth-century Scottish Presbyterian preacher John Knox and his The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (1558), in which “regiment” means “rule” or “government”:
It is more than a monster in nature that a Woman shall reign and have
empire above Man…. The Empire of a Woman is a thing repugnant to
justice, and the destruction of every commonwealth where it is received.
In Women and Power (2017), the classicist Mary
Beard reminds us that male Greek writers depicted females who assume
authority as perverters of the natural order:
For the most part, they are portrayed as abusers rather than users of
power. They take it illegitimately, in a way that leads to chaos, to
the fracture of the state, to death and destruction. They are monstrous
hybrids, who are not, in the Greek sense, women at all. And the
unflinching logic of their stories is that they must be disempowered and
put back in their place.
It is notable that Trump did not resort to this mythic level of
misogyny in his presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
He painted her as weak, crooked, and deceitful—all golden oldies of
antiwoman rhetoric. But he did not seek to construe her as the
embodiment of a hellish vision of lethal femininity. Why does Harris,
first as a vice-presidential and then as a presidential candidate,
summon from the depths of Trump’s psyche these terrifying tropes? It is
partly that Trump has become ever more disinhibited as he has grown
older and ever more inclined to turn up the dial on outrage and
provocation. Partly too that his overall vision has become even more
apocalyptic—the Whore of Babylon, if she is not stopped, heralds the end
of the world, and Trump warns that if Harris is elected America is
“finished.”
But there is another, less obvious factor: public
attitudes about the effects of gender on life in America have undergone
remarkably rapid changes in the Trump era. In 2017, the year Trump took
office (and also the year of the Me Too cascade of revelations about
rape and sexual harassment), just 35 percent of survey respondents
agreed that “men have it easier in the US today.” Now 47 percent endorse
the same proposition. Especially striking is that this alteration in
perception is bipartisan. The rise in the recognition of male privilege
is extremely pronounced among Democrats: from 49 to 68 percent. But it
is proportionally even greater among Republicans—it doubled from 16 to
32 percent. It seems that significant numbers of Trump voters came to
see America as more of a man’s world while their own man was dominating
US politics.
Yet the paradox is that this greater acknowledgment
that women live at a disadvantage to men has been matched by another,
equally dramatic shift. In 2020, 51 percent of Americans said the word
“feminist” described their views either “very well” or “somewhat well.”
Today just 35 percent say the same. Among Republican men, the figure is
just 10 percent. What has happened, then, is an increase in acceptance
of the reality that there is structural discrimination against half the
population, combined with a shying away from the ideology that seeks to
do something about it. It is in such contradictory states of mind that
dark myths have most appeal.
Why has self-identification with
feminism shrunk so significantly in such a short time? Almost certainly
because of the way Trump has managed to polarize everything—including
the notion that women have a right to equality and to control their own
bodies. He has done this, oddly enough, by making an implicit acceptance
of at least some sexual violence by men against women into a wedge
issue. This is not an effect he intended. Rather it has arisen from the
revelation in 2016 of the tape in which Trump boasted that he could
“grab [women] by the pussy” and from the verdict of a Manhattan jury in
2023 that Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll in 1995 or 1996. That
judgment amounted to a finding that Trump is a rapist: as Lewis A.
Kaplan, the judge in the civil trial, explained, “The jury’s finding of
sexual abuse…necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly
penetrated her vagina.”
This is a different kind of
unimaginable—not a twisted fantasy but a physical reality too raw and
visceral for many Americans to want to hold in their heads. In one case
by his own admission and in the other by the verdict of a jury of his
peers, Trump has given Americans images of himself forcibly grabbing and
penetrating women’s genitalia. There could be no starker expression of
male power, of the violent possession and domination of the female body.
But in order to continue to follow Trump and to vote for him, it is
necessary to do at least one of two things. The first is to deny the
truth, even when at least part of it comes from Trump’s own mouth:
slightly more than half (52 percent) of Trump voters say they do not
believe he committed sexual assault. The second is to embrace cognitive
dissonance: 5 percent say they believe he is a sex offender (but intend
to vote for him anyway), while 42 percent say they are “not sure.”
To
close up that fissure, the figure of the sex-predator president must be
obliterated by the figure of the monstrous woman. There has to be a
female violence (BLOOD ON HER HANDS!) even more terrifying
than mere male sexual aggression. It is not enough for Trump the rapist
to be opposed by a woman who is devious and weak and stupid. He must be
up against what Barbara Creed called, in the title of her groundbreaking
1993 book on horror movies, “the monstrous-feminine”: “what it is about
woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.” Hillary Clinton
was bad (and Trump did call her “the devil”)—but Harris is evil. She
must be not merely disdained but dreaded and reviled beyond the limits
of the imagination. “No person,” as Trump put it on Truth Social on
October 11, “who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala
Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become POTUS!”
This
is the most extreme example of Trump’s uncanny ability to turn the
world upside down. Trump the rapist becomes the defender of women
against the sexual violence unleashed by the monstrous-feminine: “You
will be protected,” he told women in Pennsylvania on September 23, “and I
will be your protector.” Trump has, from the beginning of his
presidential campaign in June 2015, characterized Mexican migrants as
sexual predators: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.
They’re rapists.” But as the current campaign reaches its climax, he has
made this claim more personal and intimate. He now routinely names a
girl and two women murdered in the course of sexual assaults by
undocumented immigrants: Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, and Rachel
Morin. These vilely abused bodies are not peripheral to Trump’s
campaign; they have become MAGA icons, quasi-religious female martyrs.
Democrats
must understand that however grotesque this strategy may be, it is
highly effective. It is a reminder of Trump’s boldness—instead of
avoiding a subject (sexual predation) on which he ought to be
vulnerable, he has absorbed it into his personal brand, not only as the
savior of America but now specifically as the deliverer of women and
girls. It gives women who might think twice about voting for a known
rapist a way out: Harris, the mass rapist by proxy, is even worse. And
it simultaneously endorses male self-pity. His rhetoric makes it
possible to believe that “men have it easier” not because of the
persistence of patriarchy but because all American women and girls are
in imminent danger of being raped and murdered by dark-skinned strangers
licensed by Harris. The violence perpetrated on American-born women by
their own male compatriots is projected outward onto the evil woman who
stands between Trump and his rightful place in power.
This message
resonates with a deeper sense of male victimhood. As Trump transforms
himself from predator to protector, his most ardent followers are men
who transform the real privilege of their gender into the belief that it
is they who suffer from a system rigged against masculinity. As the
moral philosopher Kate Manne puts it in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), the structures of patriarchy
are often quite invisible to the people whose privileged social
positions they serve to uphold and buttress. So dismantling them may
feel not only like a comedown, but also an injustice, to the privileged. They will tend to feel flattened, rather than merely leveled, in the process.
Large majorities of male Trump voters agree with the
propositions that “many women interpret innocent remarks or acts as
being sexist” (74 percent); “employers should not make special efforts
to hire and promote qualified women” (70 percent); “when a man and woman
get divorced, the court system will always treat the woman better” (77
percent); and “when women demand equality these days, they are actually
seeking special favors” (62 percent). In a divided culture, all games
are zero-sum—if women are gaining, men must be losing.
It has been more than a decade since the sociologist Michael Kimmel published his study Angry White Men, based on extensive interviews. As he puts it in the preface to the 2017 edition:
White men’s anger comes from the potent fusion of two
sentiments—entitlement and a sense of victimization. The righteous
indignation, the anti-Washington populism, is fueled by what I came to
call “aggrieved entitlement”—that sense that those benefits to which you
believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen
forces larger and more powerful.
Trump inflates Harris into the embodiment of these
larger and more powerful forces—and “unseen” seems especially apt in the
way it connects her to unfilmable and unimaginable horror. It helps, of
course, that she is Black. Kimmel recalled appearing on a television
talk show opposite three “angry white males” who felt they had been the
victims of workplace discrimination:
The title of this particular show, no doubt to entice a potentially
large audience, was “A Black Woman Stole My Job.” In my comments, I
asked the men to consider just one word in the title of the show: the
word my. What made them think the job was theirs? Why wasn’t the episode called “A Black Woman Got the Job” or “A Black Woman Got a Job”?
Because these guys felt that those jobs were “theirs,” that they were
entitled to them, and that when some “other” person—black, female—got
the job, that person was really taking “their” job.
The election, then, is hypergendered. But you wouldn’t
necessarily know this from the way Harris has conducted herself in its
latter stages. One of the reasons her momentum has stalled is that the
campaign seems uncertain about whether it should take part in this lurid
psychodrama or ignore it in the hope that most Americans will find it
just too weird.
An instance of this indecision was Barack Obama’s
address to “the brothers” in Pittsburgh on October 10. He admonished
Black men who are not supporting Harris: “Part of it makes me
think…that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as
president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other
reasons for that.” He specifically acknowledged that masculinity itself
is at issue in the election, wondering whether some Black men are
attracted to Trump’s bullying “because you think that’s a sign of
strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down?” Yet
Obama then went on not to discuss the madness of a rapist posing as the
protector of women but to appeal to racial solidarity: Black men should
support Harris because Black women “have been getting our backs this
entire time.” The point, however, is that Black men who support Trump
(like other men of any racial minority) do not do so as members of a
racial group. They do it as men. Obama placed gender in the forefront of
the argument but then could not quite keep it there.
As for
Harris herself, her instinct is not to play the woman card—a phrase
Hillary Clinton embraced in the 2016 race. (When Trump claimed “the only
thing she has got going is the woman’s card,” Clinton’s campaign
produced a pink card printed with the phrase “Deal me in.”) At the
Democratic convention in Chicago in August, the difference between
Clinton’s rhetoric and Harris’s was striking. Clinton wanted to define
Harris as her successor in the fight for political equality, just as she
herself was heir to the women she name-checked: Shirley Chisholm and
Geraldine Ferraro. She framed her own loss to Trump in 2016 not as a
defeat but as a stage on the way to ultimate victory: “Nearly 66 million
Americans voted for a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams.
And afterwards, we refused to give up on America.” She presented a
narrative in which “every generation [of women] has carried the torch
forward.”
But Harris did not accept Clinton’s proffered torch.
Conspicuously absent from her acceptance speech was any explicit appeal
to the obvious truth that it is long since time the US elected a female
president. This refusal was color-coded. In 2016 Clinton accepted the
Democratic nomination clad in white—the color sported by the
early-twentieth-century American suffragists. On the night of Harris’s
nomination, the delegate floor was dazzlingly white, as women wore the
same color to make the same point. But when Harris appeared, she was in
sober navy blue. “Listen,” she told CNN in August. “I am
running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at
this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.” The
combination of these two categories means, of course, that the glass
ceiling Clinton sought to shatter is reinforced with an extra layer of
prejudice.
Some of this reluctance is surely based on raw
political calculation. Clinton’s explicit presentation of herself as a
groundbreaking female candidate did not help her beat Trump. In the 2016
general election, as John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck write
in their 2018 book Identity Crisis, “Women did not rally to
Clinton’s candidacy, but men shifted to Trump—especially men with more
sexist attitudes.” Clinton did beat Trump among women voters by twelve
percentage points, but Obama had won women voters by thirteen and eleven
points in 2008 and 2012. And she lost white men by an astonishing
thirty-one points—a wider margin than any candidate since Ronald
Reagan’s landslide victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. There were more
men who voted against Clinton because she was a woman than women who
voted for her on the same grounds. It is easy to see why, looking at
those figures, Harris decided to play down her femininity. She feared
that being too upfront about the historic prospect of a woman in the
Oval Office would antagonize men without galvanizing women.
She
has another, more personal reason for her hesitancy. Harris had to
emerge as a public figure from an extremely gendered role—that of
consort to the charismatic California politician Willie Brown. The two
dated in the mid-1990s, before he became mayor of San Francisco, and
that relationship has long been exploited by right-wing commentators.
Brown explains in his autobiography, Basic Brown (2008), exactly what that position demanded:
Naturally, it’s not easy being the date of Willie Brown either! It’s
hard to find a companion who can handle dating Willie Brown, because
that often means being ignored. When I walk into a party or public
dinner or other social gathering, instantly all the attention is focused
on me. Everybody wants to BS with me. My poor date may not know anybody else in the room.
Harris knows, in ways that no male politician ever
could, that a woman in public life has to navigate between this kind of
invisibility and its opposite: extreme scrutiny of her appearance. In
2013 no less a figure than Obama himself, speaking at a Democratic Party
fundraiser in San Francisco, remarked of Harris: “You have to be
careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and
she is tough…. She also happens to be, by far, the best-looking attorney
general in the country. It’s true! C’mon.” While Obama also had a habit
of introducing a male officeholder as a “good-looking guy,” the obvious
difference is that with Harris being beautiful becomes as much an
accusation as a compliment. Her looks have long been both politicized
and sexualized through the implication that she has succeeded only by
being physically alluring to powerful men, that her function in the
various offices she has held has been purely decorative. As J.D. Vance
demanded of her at a rally in Michigan, “What has she done other than
collect a check from her political offices?”
In August Trump went
further and suggested that Harris traded sexual favors for political
advancement, reposting on Truth Social photographs of her and Hillary
Clinton that were captioned: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their
careers differently…” His constant references to her as “really DUMB”
have this same sexual overtone—if she has risen so far with so little
intelligence, there can be only one explanation. It is not accidental
that for Trump supporters, the image of the Whore of Babylon is made
literal. Among the ghost prompts still offered by Amazon’s search bar
are “Joe and the Hoe gotta go flag,” “Joe and the Hoe gotta go yard
sign,” and “Joe and Hoe gotta go hat.” Since Biden’s decision to step
aside, the T-shirts and trucker hats sold on websites now leave him out
of it: “Say No to the Hoe.” It is easy to understand why Harris prefers
to stay as far away as possible from this vileness.
An unfortunate
side effect of her unwillingness to be more explicit about the
importance of gender in the election, however, is that she ends up
trying to compete on macho terms. She plays the Pistol-Packin’ Mama,
talking about owning a Glock, firing it at a range, and being ready to
use it in earnest: “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting
shot.” And this gun talk is magnified in her repeated evocation of the
American military’s lethality: “As commander in chief, I will ensure
America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the
world”—a formulation she used in both her acceptance speech and her
debate with Trump. There is something too transparently performative
about this posturing. It undercuts Harris’s messaging on gun violence in
the US (surely an electoral asset) and patently evades all serious
moral and political questions about the use and abuse of American
military power.
Yet she has other instincts—and her own version of
mythological female power. In 2003, in her first television interview
as a candidate for district attorney in San Francisco, Harris, according
to her biographer Dan Morain,
spoke of her admiration for the Hindu goddess Kali, a mythological
warrior who protects innocents by slaying evil. In a classic depiction,
Kali holds the decapitated head of a demon, has a necklace of severed
heads, and wears a skirt of bloody arms.
She seems capable of having fun with the very myth of the killer woman that Trump seeks to use against her.
Harris
has spoken eloquently of how she decided to become a prosecutor because
her best friend in high school confided that her stepfather was being
sexually abusive. At the beginning of her presidential campaign, Harris
did indeed present herself as a ferocious protector of women and
children: “As a young courtroom prosecutor in Oakland, California, I
stood up for women and children against predators who abused them,” she
said in her acceptance speech. In her first speech after Biden announced
his decision not to run, she explicitly targeted Trump the rapist,
saying that she had gone after “predators who abused women, fraudsters
who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own
gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.” She added,
simply, that “Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing
sexual abuse.”
These words carry the electrical charge of brutal
clarity. It is a truth that should not be normalized. His former White
House adviser Kellyanne Conway has remarked accurately that “I think
people have very thick shock absorbers when it comes to Donald Trump.” A
critical part of Harris’s job is to disable those shock absorbers, to
make enough wavering voters feel the full force of the reality that
predation is his way of life. She can’t do that while giving him free
rein to run what must surely be the most wildly misogynistic campaign
ever staged in a democracy. Kali has to find a way to behead the real
monster.
In 2008, when the allegedly un-American views of his
pastor were being used by the right to stir racial animosities, Obama
confronted the attack head-on by making a thoughtful, reflective, but
combative and unyielding speech about race in America. Harris has a
great deal to say on that subject—but also on the real experience of
being a woman in the US. The Trump campaign has sought to disembody her,
both by turning her into a she-devil and, with slightly more subtlety,
by suggesting that she is childless and therefore, as Republican
Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders puts it, “doesn’t have anything
keeping her humble.” Here Trump’s way of talking her up as an unnatural
and existential threat is combined with the accusation that this Black
woman is being uppity. Harris is, in this telling, a creature
unconnected to real family life. But she shows in her demeanor that she
is in fact comfortable in her own body and in her own skin. She needs to
express that defiant comfort more directly in her words, to say once
and for all why keeping women humble is not an acceptable agenda.