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Throw Everything Against The Wall And See What Sticks

The initial round of GOP attacks on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris have so far been scattershot, inconsistent, self-contradictory, and often comical. But we’ve seen it all before, and we know how this works.

The volume and intensity of the attacks – deeply suffused with misogyny and racism – represent 1,000 trial balloons. Some will pop on their own and others will get shot down immediately, but eventually a few will get through the blitz of counterattacks. Those few will offer a clue as to what “works,” and they’ll form the basis for additional rounds of attacks playing off of the same theme or underlying premise, however false it may be.

Repeated often enough, the attacks will slowly accrete into a “thing” that unsophisticated editors and reporters notice. They start asking questions about it. Their questions may seem benign and the early round of stories often tepid (I promise you that before the week is out a reporter is going to grab ahold of the attacks on Harris as a “DEI hire” and use them as a peg to write more generally about DEI), but gradually the “thing” becomes a narrative.

The narrative, with more repetition, begins to be a problem. Maybe the campaign or the candidate says something in frustration and presto you have a pissing match for reporters to cover. Or perhaps the candidate is caught off-guard and gives a casual or ill-thought-out response. There’s blood in the water. Now it’s gone from a problem to baggage that the candidate has to do something about.

What began as toxic, racist, misogynistic drivel is a now a trap that has ensnared the candidate. At each step of the way, the audience for the lie, mistruth, or innuendo has broadened. Each subsequent iteration repeats the attack again to everyone who already heard it before. What started as scattershot attacks has now become a sustained drumbeat that sneakily enters the public consciousness almost undetected.

What I’m describing – a stripped-down description of swift-boating as it has existed in the 20 years since John Kerry was filleted by it – is not easy to combat or to counter. Calling out the lies, or the racism, or the misogyny, while better than whitewashing it, isn’t sufficient, especially in a world where the bigotry is the point and legions of Trump supporters are lapping it up.

The urge to rebut each attack whack-a-mole style may be well-intentioned, but it’s a fool’s errand. Taking on the task of confronting an endless supply of baseless attacks is to let your opponent run you in circles. Distinguishing who the audience is for the attacks – the MAGA base? mainstream reporters? swing voters? all of the above? – can sometimes help focus the counterattacks, but we’re beyond the point where the people left in the Republican Party are capable of being shamed by the nature or subtext of rancid attacks exploiting race and gender bias.

I don’t have the answers to this problem. What I can tell you is that in the relatively short 15 years I’ve been doing this job, the information environment has been radically transformed. What defined TPM in the early days was calling out these kinds of attacks for what they were, but that was back when Republican electeds were trying to soft-pedal this stuff into the mainstream and would awkwardly retreat when called out on it. Starting in 2010, with the Tea Party backlash to President Obama, that began to change. By the time we got to Trump circa 2016, any pretense of soft-pedaling it, let alone shame, was long gone.

In general, mainstream outlets have gotten much better at being direct and not euphemistic about these kinds of attacks, but not all of them have. At the same time, Republicans have trained reporters so well that they now often anticipate and air the Republican attacks before they’re even made. Not the public service journalism we’re looking for.

One advantage TPM has that makes exercising good news judgment in these scenarios a little less daunting is that we serve a specific, defined, sophisticated audience. We know who our readers are. We can flag new lines of attack in their nascent stages, usually without acute concern that we’re fanning the flames. We can broadly reference the nature and subtext of the attacks without getting tied in knots over it because we share a common understanding and language with our audience.

But that isn’t true for every outlet. So while the first 48 hours of Harris’ candidacy have featured an almost cartoonish response from MAGA world, there’s a method to the madness. The effect over time is to work the refs – mainstream news outlets – and wait for them to break down and for the attacks to break through to a wider audience. One way to combat the effort is be a sophisticated news consumer who is aware of it and sees it for what it is.

Quote Of The Day

Before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected a United States senator, I was the elected attorney general of California. And before that I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. 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.

Vice President Kamala Harris, in her first meeting with campaign staffers in Wilmington, Delaware

Are We Taking The Right Lessons From 2016?

A gentle reminder that Hillary Clinton decisively won the popular vote in 2016. Any analysis that traces her failure to win the Electoral College vote back to her gender is really missing the broader point. We’ve shown we’re capable of electing a woman president.

A Reminder Of The Stakes

MAGA Republicans continue to look for every chance to turn our cold civil war into a hot one:

Ohio state Sen. George Lang at JD Vance’s rally: “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country.” pic.twitter.com/7jtJz2XsAZ

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) July 22, 2024

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