“Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” So said a post, featuring photos of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and her 2016 predecessor Hillary Clinton, on social media site Truth Social.
The post was reshared by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and was an apparent reference to a common right-wing insinuation that Harris’s one-time relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown was key to progressing her career, and a nod to the affair between Bill Clinton and then White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s.
It was another disqualifying moment beneath the dignity of anyone running for office, as was the Access Hollywood tape in 2016 in which Trump boasted of getting away with sexual assault, before it became a conclusive indicator of Trump’s impunity with his base.
The major difference with Trump sharing the above post is that today there is no flurry of Republicans distancing themselves from the former president, beyond some mild talk of “frustration“.
Reaching across the aisle
This makes it all the funnier that Harris has used her first major network interview as the Democratic nominee to say that if she wins, she’s appointing a Republican to serve in her cabinet. She told CNN journalist Dana Bash that she had spent her career “inviting diversity of opinion”.
“I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my cabinet who was a Republican.”
Presumably she does not want that diversity of opinion to include a belief that Trump is waging a secret war against a network of Satanist pedophiles in the elite circles of government, business and the media, a belief that Trump has more and more explicitly encouraged. That said, if she interprets Republican loosely enough, she could take her pick from the more than 200 former Republican presidential nominee staffers who have endorsed her.
The graveyard of ambition
Exhibit 8 trillion in the “this would be a campaign defining controversy for anyone else” has been the alleged fracas between Trump staff and workers at Arlington Cemetery, America’s biggest military graveyard. It was first reported on Tuesday that Trump staffers allegedly pushed and verbally attacked a cemetery official who had tried to stop them from taking photos and videos in Section 60, where soldiers killed in recent conflicts are interred.
Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung said “there was no physical altercation as described,” classily adding, without providing evidence, that “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony”. In a rare public statement on a political matter, the US Army has defended the employee who they say was “abruptly pushed aside” for trying to enforce the cemetery’s rules.
Harris, who had initially remained quiet — not that it stopped JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential candidate, from telling her to “go to hell” — posted that Trump had “disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt”.
For his part, JD Vance proved his common touch by managing to make ordering donuts so chilly and awkward that the moment threatened to shatter like the T1000 drenched in liquid nitrogen, and got regularly booed by the “haters” at the known woke hive of the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston.
Polls
Meanwhile, a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Thursday has Harris widening her lead over Trump, now ahead 45% to 41%. So Trump’s campaign is in chaos, and he looks increasingly erratic, desperate and unelectable compared to the relatively smooth consensus building of an opponent stretching their lead over him in polls. Just like in 2016.
