In her 2019 memoir, Kamala Harris wrote, “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”
As she did, when she dismissed Donald Trump’s unbelievable attack on her blackness as the “same old show” of “divisiveness and disrespect.” Or to quote Ronald Reagan’s ultimate dismissal of Jimmy Carter’s attacks, “There you go again.”
It was Trump, being “weird” again. There was no need for Harris to say any more. Every news story underscored the fact that the Howard-educated former president of the Black Law Students Association at Hastings Law has nothing to prove about her blackness.
So why did Trump say it? And why choose an audience of black journalists as your audience? What was he doing there in the first instance?
To the extent that there is a racist vote in this country, Trump already has it. He doesn’t need to say a word.
Leaders of his own party — including the current and former speaker of the House, as well as top strategists who he is clearly (by their own leaks) ignoring — have warned him and other Republicans away from frontal racial assaults. They alienate more swing voters than they attract. The message we were supposed to be hearing this week was all about her record as a supposedly liberal district attorney with a bad record on the border.
Instead, in a feat of derring-do, Donald Trump stole back the headlines from Harris’ stunning debut — and J.D. Vance’s Dan Quayle-like nightmare — to become the star of the week, the focus of attention for, of all things, his decision to play the race card against Harris in an assault with no upside except for her.
Maybe the point was just that. Trump clearly hates not being the center of the limelight. He came out of his convention flying high, having ignored those who must have warned him that Vance posed real risks, believing he could choose who he, and Tucker, and Junior, liked best, and Biden and Harris stole his thunder away before the weekend was out. Now everyone was playing the guessing game about Harris’ VP choice and the enthusiasm and size of her crowds, and he simply couldn’t bear being ignored.
And he did it before a hostile black audience so he could go after them as well.
He wanted to have a fight. He wanted to get back in the limelight.
So he did.
And that’s what scares me. He is totally undisciplined.
He is spinning like he is out of control. He is not sticking to message. He is not saying what he is supposed to say. He is doing everything we teach toddlers not to do.
The week began when he insisted that he meant what he said about Christians not needing to vote in subsequent elections if they voted for him in this one, rather than walking away from what was at best a careless anti-democratic slur. No, he doubled down and confirmed it to Laura Ingraham, which gave him an extra two or three days of negative coverage. And then he went, of all places, to the National Association of Black Journalists, which he had to know was a hostile venue, and jumped into the attack on Harris’ identity and integrity that should have been beneath even him.
It’s Donald being Donald, which is not even good politics for him, which raises the question again of what it says about Donald the would-be next president.
A president who is not disciplined about what they say and do is not someone who is up to the job. Donald being Donald, I submit, is a very dangerous thing.
Susan Estrich is a lawyer, professor, author and political commentator.
