Francis Wilkinson: When Harris calls Trump a predator, voters will listen

Kamala Harris visited her campaign headquarters on Monday and delivered a key message.

Before becoming a U.S. senator and then vice president, Harris reminded the crowd, she was California’s attorney general and a courtroom prosecutor. “In those roles,” she said, “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.”

Elections are about the future. In this election, pitting a female avatar of the multi-racial 21st century against an old White man’s reactionary expedition to the 19th century, the stakes for the future are especially clear, and terrifyingly high.

Harris will have to make the case for pluralism and freedom, civil rights and human dignity, against Trump’s authoritarian repression and its consequences for women, Black and Brown Americans and anyone who doesn’t conform to the White Christian nationalist hierarchy of preferred “real Americans.”

But this election is also very much about predation. Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court, including Trump’s three appointees, unfurled a series of rulings this year that will result in corporate predators poisoning the water and air and political predators exploiting their power for personal gain. In the court’s most insidious ruling, they established a quasi-kingship for Trump should he return to office, and a blanket of immunity for some of his past predation even if he fails to regain power.

Trump, of course, has lived a predatory life. He used his vast inherited wealth to cheat small contractors who couldn’t afford to outlast his tactical delays in the legal system. He set up a bogus university to defraud students. He took tax-deductible donations to his foundation and spent them on himself. And he has been accused of attacking many women over the years.

As one political observer tweeted in October 2016, “What percentage of the American population has @realDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?”

That observer was Trump’s current running mate, J.D. Vance, who, of course, stepped into the role after Trump sicced a violent mob on his last running mate. Like everyone else with the capacity to recognize moral degeneracy, Vance knew, and still knows, that Trump is a sexual predator. Discussing one victim’s claims against Trump on MSNBC in 2016, Vance said, “At a fundamental level, this is sort of a ‘he said, she said,’ right? And at the end of the day, do you believe Donald Trump, who always tells the truth? Just kidding,” said Vance.

In 2016, Vance shared on Facebook an essay by Russell Moore, a Southern Baptist Convention leader who defied his organization’s capitulation to Trump. In the essay, Moore decried Trump’s “misogynistic statements” and “racist invective” and “crazed conspiracy theorizing.” Elsewhere, Moore, evangelical America’s most prominent Trump critic, compared Trump’s stance toward women to that of a “Bronze Age warlord.”

Vance knows what we all know: Trump is not just a convicted felon, he also has been found liable for sexual assault.

Political campaigns highlight contrasts. You could hardly find one more enlightening than the contrast of the prosecutor versus the criminal, or the woman warrior versus the sexual abuser.

Democrats pushed President Joe Biden to step aside precisely because he was failing to articulate the moral, political and national calamity that would result from a second Trump presidency. Go back to the words Harris uttered this week — “predators who abused women; fraudsters who ripped off consumers; cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”

That’s not slipshod rhetoric. Those are the undeniable signifiers of the Republican nominee for president. Trump’s history of predation is a promise of future criminality should he and his gang of thugs return to power. American voters will have to weigh many issues this fall. But Harris shouldn’t permit them to forget exactly who Trump is, and she can employ Trump’s running mate as a key witness. From here to November, the prosecutor should prosecute the predator.

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Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.

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