The Witness Chronicles, August 30, 2024
They’re slinging mud but it’s not hitting anything
Harris Won’t Get Down Into the Mud With Trump and Vance
She knows that is what he wants, but it ain’t happening
My theme the past few days seems to be just how despicable the Trump campaign has been since they discovered they didn’t have Joe Biden to beat up on. Faced with running against a multi-racial woman, the best they have come up with is mudslinging on a level we have not seen before.
There is no ‘how low will they go?’. There is no bottom.
But it is all falling flat because the ultimate goal of this kind of mudslinging is trying to get your opponents to hit back and get down in the muck with you. And the Harris/Walz campaign is not taking the bait. They are not even acknowledging its existence.
In the CNN interview last night Harris was asked about one example of Trump’s invective and her answer? Pass, next question.
The irony in this approach is that it has the effect of further infuriating everyone on the Right until they can no longer even muster further effective insults. That’s because they have already said the worst things that can be said about the Democrats and they have had no effect. But they keep trying.
I would honestly like to be writing about policy differences between the candidates, but I have no idea what the actual policies of the Republican Party under Trump are. Every time they try to clarify a position, Trump contradicts it. A prime example is abortion and women’s reproductive rights.
Trump knows this issue is extremely destructive to his popularity among a demographic he needs, white college educated women. So he tries to wiggle away from the issue. One day he says I stand for this, the next he says something different. Six weeks or more? IVF support or not? Protecting the life of the mother, rape, incest, ok or not? Don’t ask me, I have no idea.
Complicating this is his running mate’s downright strange attitude towards women in general. Vance obviously falls in the ‘keep ‘em in kitchen and pregnant’ camp, seemingly stuck in some kind of nineteen fifties world that never existed except in the heads of Neanderthal right wing fantasists (apologies to actual Neanderthals).
The net result, in this issue, is confusion on the part of Trump’s supporters, especially those who are one issue voters on abortion rights. Those voters want no exceptions for anything, but they are a small minority, though one Republicans have courted with anti-abortion stances for decades.
Before the rejection of Roe v Wade by the Trump Supreme Court, Roe actually gave Republicans cover for saying they were against abortion but blocked from doing anything about it. With Roe gone we get the total confusion on the issue, especially among men, and we are seeing it every day from Trump and Vance.
The widespread support for women’s reproductive rights now puts those previously anti-abortion politicians in a quandary with no Roe to blame. They have to take a stand and back it up with action. Either way they risk alienating voters they once had. And that’s just one policing issue.
One of the insult paths Trump shamelessly follows is implying that Harris and other women only got into power by providing sexual favors. This incredibly demeaning kind of thing is an insult to all women, yet they continue to say it even as they try to find support among women.
When the right attempts to address issues, they always run into this conundrum. A major issue like border security would seem to be their issue, but Trump’s skewering of the bipartisan funding bill earlier this year comes back to bite them when it was intended to give Trump the issue.
It didn’t help that a recent campaign appearance at a border wall to highlight their immigration fear mongering was ineffective because of a major blunder in the planning. The wall section they used as a backdrop had been built by the Obama administration.
On the Democratic side, these inconsistencies hand the party real attack points which they are successfully using, in part because they have found an elusive unity while the right is splintered between MAGA extremists and more conventional conservative Party members. The Dems are exploiting those differences too.
All of this is evidence of the remarkable shift we have seen since Biden stepped away last month. Trump’s successful divide and conquer strategy is now being used against him and he has no ability to counter it. Except for falling back on his endless flow of childish and hateful insults and lies. But if you lie constantly and inconsistently you leave openings for the Democrats to come after you. And they are.
This situation will not change because the Trump campaign knows no other path and has no control over their candidate, who has no control over himself. And the Trump campaign has pushed out anyone who could help change the message and reinforced their team with even more divisive advisors.
They have nothing and doubling down is not helping. And Kamala is not taking the bait, she’s laughing at it.
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He made promises, he took millions in exchange for future favors. I would welcome prison as it would allow him to hide from thse ripped donors...