When Joe Biden passed the torch to Kamala Harris, she almost immediately went on the attack against Donald Trump. This represented a radical change from Biden's approach to the Democrats' political battle with Trump and his MAGAfied Republican Party.
Trump’s strengths and brand are based on being a bully. He insults his enemies. He shows no respect for norms of behavior or human decency. Trump attacks again and again until his target is left shell-shocked. He attempts to dominate and control every situation. His social dominance orientation is centered on hostile sexism, crude masculinity and, of course, racism.
In a recent essay at the Guardian, Carter Sherman writes:
[B]ut Americans’ obsession with masculinity is, to the point that it can determine the outcome even of presidential elections where two men are running. (So, most of them.) Americans revere presidents as role models, fixating on their status — real or perceived — as founding fathers, real fathers, war heroes, and masters of diplomacy and making money and cheating on their wives without getting caught (or, at least, without getting divorced). Because presidents epitomize American notions of manhood, elections reveal what kind of man, what type and degree of masculinity, is most respected and deserving of power.
Trump has turned his campaign into a pitch for hyper-traditional masculinity. At this year’s Republican national convention, he walked on stage to the James Brown song "It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World" and was introduced by Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship who was caught slapping his wife on camera. On the campaign trail, he has hammed it up with YouTubers and podcasters who have male-centric audiences and dim views of women.
With the general public and her opponent so preoccupied by masculinity, Harris is not emphasizing her pioneering nomination. Rather, in order to win a contest that no woman has ever won, she’s trying to take advantage of stereotypes about men, women and leadership — and, when they can’t work in her favor, using them to kneecap Trump instead.
Masculinity, it turns out, may be the most partisan issue in US politics.
Instead of trying to avoid Trump’s perceived strengths, Harris and her campaign have attacked them through mockery and ridicule. Trump is notoriously thin-skinned and easily provoked. Harris has used that character flaw against him successfully; Trump almost always takes the bait.
Instead of engaging Trump on his terms, Harris either outright ignores him or responds as though he is an adult baby throwing a tantrum. Where others have backed down, Harris, a former prosecutor, knows that the best strategy is to directly confront bullies and thugs, who are not used to such a response — especially from a woman. For example, during their first and likely only debate, Harris confronted and directly engaged Trump’s lies and bullying behavior. It appeared that Trump did not know how to respond. This self-appointed alpha male who has been called America’s "first white president," was symbolically neutered by a Black South Asian woman.
In a series of recent conversations with Salon, political scientist M. Steven Fish described Harris’ version of high-dominance leadership style and how she deployed it to defeat Trump during their debate:
... [S]he scrapped the time-worn, fruitless Democratic practice of treating Trump mainly as a dangerous, imperious liar. Instead, she cast him as insecure, tiresome and small. Playing on Trump’s crowd-size obsession, she invited viewers to attend a Trump rally, telling them they would see the crowds thinning out early as bored spectators headed for the doors. A stammering Trump responded, “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics!” and then launched into his conspiracy theory lies about how immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Rather than just calling Trump a friend of dictators, she got deliciously derisive. She mentioned that “It is well known that he exchanged love letters with Kim Jong-un” and pointed out that “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.” Turning to Trump, she said America’s enemies were rooting for him since “they can manipulate you with flattery and favors. And that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace.”
Trump and his surrogates — most notably his running mate, Sen. JD Vance — have reacted with more racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, misogyny, threats of violence, demagoguery, lies and other antidemocratic and antisocial behavior. As described by Stephen Collinson at CNN, Trump and his campaign have gone “feral.”
Harris and her surrogates are not deterred by Trump and his campaign’s response to the growing pressure. For example, Harris has challenged Trump to a second debate. Given how badly he was publicly thrashed during their first encounter, Trump has declared that there will be no rematch. In a new ad, Harris’s campaign is using Trump’s attempts to escape a second debate as part of its high-dominance leadership strategy. As the Washington Post reports:
For the millions of football fans who tuned in from home for Saturday night’s much anticipated matchup between the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama, [Harris] also ran a new ad nationally on ABC that hammers home her point.
“Winners never back down from a challenge. Champions know it’s anytime, anyplace. But losers, they whine and waffle and take their ball home,” the narrator says at the start of the spot, over images of a football game and washed-out footage of Trump missing a golf putt.
The 30-second ad ends with footage of Harris challenging him to another debate, with the words “When we fight, we win” hanging on a sign in the background.
“Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage. If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,” Harris says.
As the Post reports, the Harris campaign is seeking to challenge Trump's masculinity directly, "sending surrogates on cable news to mock Trump’s rejection of another meeting in increasingly blunt terms," with Harris strategist David Plouffe, a veteran of Barack Obama's campaigns, repeatedly referring to Trump as "chicken man" on social media:
“She took his lunch money last time,” Harris-Walz campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu said Thursday on MSNBC. “He lost and he knows it and he’s afraid of being humiliated again,” Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) said days earlier.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) went even further on Sept. 21. “If you remember the first debate, he would not even look at her once. He never even glanced at her because he is a coward,” he said. “He’s too scared to debate her.”
Harris' campaign is even attacking Trump in his own safe space, posting the aforementioned campaign ad on Truth Social, the social media platform Trump owns.
In another example of high-dominance leadership, Harris is undermining Trump’s political brand and persona as a tough guy who respects (and admires) tyrants and “killers” like Vladimir Putin and brags that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without alienating his followers. (On that latter point, Trump is likely correct.) During a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, Harris shared the unexpected news that she is a gun owner and would defend herself and her family with lethal force if necessary. That was clearly an attempt to chip away at the Trump-Republican brand as exclusive defenders of “gun rights,” and an effort to undermine the deep connection, in American popular imagination (as well as in law and history), between guns and white masculinity.
“Democrats don’t need Harris to go out and shoot guns in her campaign ad or on the campaign trail,” Nichole Bauer, a Louisiana State University professor who studies political communication, told the Guardian. “But they do need her to display those masculine qualities that we associate with political leaders, and those are really masculine qualities that we don’t always think of as being gendered — like talking about her experience as a vice-president, an attorney general, a senator.”
Military leadership and service (and the claims on rights and citizenship that come with it) are also broadly perceived in American culture asthe near-exclusive province of men and “traditional” masculinity. To that point, the role of president and commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet is also gendered. Harris is showing strength against Trump in that arena as well. Last week, she was endorsed by more than 700 national security leaders and former military officials.
At Slate, Fred Kaplan focuses on how Harris’ acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention demonstrated her strengths in national security:
Most of her speech dealt with traditional domestic themes, but the passages on defense and foreign policy formed in many ways the most impassioned part of her speech — and certainly rank among the most muscular delivered by any candidate at a Democratic convention in living memory….
None of this should be overstated. Harris has been the leading figure in Biden’s foreign policy. His special advisers — National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and CIA Director William Burns — have been the main executors. But Kamala Harris has been in the room where it’s happened; she’s observed all of it and engaged in much of it. That alone makes her more prepared to step up to the job of commander in chief than any incoming president, except for Biden himself, in more than 50 years.
A recent public opinion poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs suggests that Harris' attacks on Trump’s brand of hyper-masculinity appear to be working. As the Daily Beast summarized the findings, respondents “chose Harris 59 percent over Trump’s 57 percent when it came to which candidate they felt was tough enough to be president," and favored Harris 55 to 46 percent on "which candidate would change the country for the better," and by 54 to 43 percent on who "was more likely to fight for them.”
Harris now appears to lead Trump by a narrow margin in national polls, although they remain essentially tied in the battleground states that will decide the results in the Electoral College. Public opinion polls have consistently shown that national security and immigration-related issues are strengths for Trump and the Republicans.
Harris, like other Black women, experiences the double bind of having to navigate racism and sexism. Her high-dominance leadership style appears to be working, but it must still overcome the final test: whether enough (white) Americans will be comfortable with a Black woman as president, or whether the country’s deep institutional, systemic and cultural hostility toward Black people – and Black women in particular – put aspiring dictator Trump back in the White House.
The “personal is political” is not an exclusive slogan and principle of feminists or leftists. White men are Trump’s strongest supporters. In Harris’ strong leadership and her successful undermining of Trump’s hyper-masculinity and bullying behavior, many white men may feel a collective narcissistic injury and growing feelings of insecurity and obsolescence. (In reality, white men still dominate economic, political and cultural power in America.) When white male decide between Harris and Trump on Election Day, the extent of this aggrieved white masculinity (and its effects on white women and others invested in it) may be the fulcrum on which the future of American democracy pivots.
