8/13/20
WASHINGTON — In the hours since Senator Kamala Harris joined the Democratic presidential ticket, President Trump has responded by sorting women into two categories: the good “suburban housewife” he believes will vote for him, and nasty women who have not shown him or his political allies a sufficient amount of respect. After Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, announced on Tuesday that Ms. Harris would be his running mate, Mr. Trump wasted no time sorting her into the “nasty” camp, a category occupied by the last woman to run against him on a Democratic ticket. “She was extraordinarily nasty to Brett Kavanaugh — Judge Kavanaugh then, now Justice Kavanaugh,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, using “nasty” or some version of the word no fewer than four times as he referred to Senate confirmation hearings held in 2018. At one point, Ms. Harris asked the Supreme Court nominee whether he could think of any existing laws that govern the male body. Mr. Kavanaugh could not.
Race-based attacks soon followed. On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump crowed that the American “suburban housewife” — a racist euphemism for white women wary of minorities moving into their neighborhoods — would be on his side in November. On matters of race and gender, Mr. Trump has always believed that indulging his instincts has elevated his political brand. But just as public attitudes on racism have shifted, threatening to turn the president and his embrace of the Confederacy into a living relic, his views on American women — particularly the suburban ones — are similarly anachronistic. When Ms. Harris’s role was announced Tuesday, both the president and his campaign seemed uncoordinated and unclear about how best to attack her record effectively. But uglier insults made by Mr. Trump’s closest allies may foreshadow what is to come: Last year, Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. questioned on Twitter whether Ms. Harris was Black enough to be addressing issues faced by Black Americans. He eventually deleted the tweet.