Criticize Democrats all day long, but questioning whether Harris is a “real American” is an attack on America itself.
CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 19
And I am.
And you know what? So is Kamala Harris.
Who is calling Harris un-American? Donald Trump himself, of course, has questioned her racial legitimacy, as he did with President Barack Obama. And just this week, the National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote in The New York Times that Harris is “a phony” who “doesn’t care about the country” and will therefore lose the “character” debate against Trump.
What evidence did the Times demand before publishing Lowry’s smear that Harris has inferior moral character to an adjudicated rapist, fraud, and insurrectionist? None, it turns out. Lowry just asserts it, and the Times just prints it.
Lowry’s claim, of course, is absurd. According to his own Cabinet officials and his own family, Trump is a fabulist and malignant narcissist who cares only about himself. General John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, wrote that Trump “has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” By contrast, Harris is a lifelong public servant who won an election as attorney general by working for her clients, the people of the state of California, against lawbreakers such as Trump.
So why are the Times and Lowry engaged in this deceit?
For their part, Republicans must make Harris into the devil. As The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols explained, GOP elites “must now define Harris—and all Democrats—as evil beyond words. Otherwise, how would they explain the ghastly compromises they’ve made? … When other conservatives, such as noted retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, are enthusiastically endorsing Harris, some pretty fancy dancing is required.”
As for the Times, their sense of safety comes from broadcasting “both sides” false equivalence. The Times has a tradition of finding comfort in this pseudo-savvy: In 1922, the Times confidently reported that “credible” and “sophisticated” German political observers viewed Adolf Hitler as a patriot who would not be so dangerous in practice.
If fascists win this election, it will be due to willful blindness by elites in the media and in business.
We need to tell the truth. Trump 2024 is tribalism and violence incarnate. He and his running mate are schoolyard bullies: small men who make themselves feel big by attacking the woman who looks different. While they campaign to end our constitutional order, somehow the urban woman is the one whose motives and alliances deserve suspicion.
Americans are human and therefore susceptible to these tactics, which is why we are tied two months out in a choice between a prosecutor and a convicted felon. In 2021, Rachel Kleinfeld at the Carnegie Endowment explained that the “bedrock idea” of the violent right is that “white Christian men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat … and Donald Trump will safeguard their way of life.” In 2019, former Cato scholar Will Wilkinson (who was later fired for telling the truth about political violence) wrote that “America’s parties have now split relatively cleanly,” with internal migration and self-selection creating Trump’s America: “a zero-sum, ethnocentric mindset receptive to scapegoating populist rhetoric about the threat of ‘un-American’ immigrants, minorities, and liberal elites.” In 2017, a Reuters/Ipsos survey found more than a third of American adults agreed that “white people are currently under attack in this country.”
This mindset is grim and unsettling, but I believe that we will defeat it. America is better than Putin and Trump think we are. Every patriot who values the soul of America will stand with Harris against these smears.
That includes me. I am a real American. I was born here, a child of immigrants. To me, America is a place where Michelle, a Jew whose grandparents fled the pogroms, could marry Rolf, a war refugee from Germany whose aunts and uncles were Nazis. My mom and dad met in grad school at Cal, and I was born in Oakland—simple biological facts also true of the vice president. If Trump 2024 suggests that Harris is not American, they literally deny my American identity.
I take that personally. So will an electoral majority of Americans, I believe. People like us make up the fabric and greatness of this country. And we intend to fight for our country.
