Former President Trump’s campaign is in a fierce tailspin as his failed attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris haven’t been able to slow her popularity.
“It’s very clear the former president is unraveling. He’s having a complete meltdown,” Ashley Etienne, a former President Biden staffer and political advisor, said during a recent segment on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show. “Kamala Harris has got him a chokehold that is really driving him to the point of insanity, and really driving his campaign to the point of paralysis.”
Harris is officially the Democratic presidential nominee. Nonetheless, Trump has continued to describe the vice president’s elevation to the top of her party’s ticket as “unconstitutional” and accused her of taking part in a “coup.” Recently, Trump told reporters that he was “very angry “at Harris and ranted, “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks.”
“I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president,” Trump added.
During a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump went off script and declared himself more attractive. “I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” Trump declared to a crowd of supporters. For a man to compare his attractiveness to a woman’s is odd and arguably creepy. And if Trump genuinely believes he supersedes Harris in the looks department, he needs to take a good look in a mirror.
He also claimed Harris is not Black and only started “pretending” to be Black when she decided to run for political office. And he continues his perverse obsession with crowd size, claiming he had a bigger crowd at the Ellipse in Washington D.C. during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enjoyed at the Lincoln Memorial for his “I Have a Dream” speech in August 1963, which drew an estimated 250,000 people.
Trump also claimed that a crowd that showed up to greet Harris at the Detroit airport simply didn’t exist. “There was nobody on the plane, and her campaign used ‘A.I.’ instead,” Trump declared. That would come as a surprise to the 15,000 fans in attendance, captured on video by multiple news outlets.
There are a number of reasons the right-wing obsession and fascination with Harris is so rampant. Apart from her being the Democratic’s presidential candidate, she is a biracial woman of color and one of a very small number of women of color in Congress. She is unapologetically direct in a professional sense.
Harris exudes a refreshing level of confidence. She is the embodiment of the living nightmare for many right-wingers. Biracial, candid and competent. She epitomizes pretty much everything many of them dislike. For a first-term congressperson to have struck such fear into a sizable sector of a political movement is interesting.
Trump has claimed Biden deployed the FBI to Mar-a-Lago with the intent to assassinate him. He accused Biden of “faking” having COVID. He claims Democrats want to murder babies after birth, and that Venezuela is releasing its convicts from prison and sending them to the United States with the administration’s blessing. And, of course, he is still touting the same lie that he, not Biden, won the 2020 election.
The truth is there’s nothing amusing about Trump’s rhetoric. He’s not confused. He is a mentally unhinged person.
The media should be discussing that alarming reality every day. Rather than treating Trump as if he is a run-of-the-mill candidate when he clearly is not, and begin reporting him for what he is — an older man who has already reached the stage of mental illness and is rapidly becoming worse as time progresses.
One can only wonder how many Republicans — and segments of the media — would have demanded invoking the 25th Amendment had Biden stated such falsehoods.
Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.
