Now Republicans Are Being Told Not to Be Racist/Sexist

Good luck with that

From VP Kamala Harris’ Twitter.

Unbelievable.

Republican leaders are now telling each other not to talk about Kamala Harris’ race and gender.

Focusing on race and gender are the only things that have landed Republicans votes for the past 20 years. The GOP is the party, after all, that held up MASS DEPORTATION NOW placards as a final rallying cry at the Republican National Convention.

Now they want to pretend they haven’t animated hatred against women and people of color within their own party? They’re going to pretend their own VP candidate JD Vance didn’t say “We are effectively run in this country… by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

Too little, too late, GOPers.

According to the AP: In a closed-door meeting House Republicans are being told to limit criticism of Harris to the Biden-Harris administration’s policies and not talk about her race or gender.

Republicans know two things that make this a critical time for the presidential campaign:

1. Trump needs key swing voter groups, including suburban women, as well as the non-white and younger voters the Trump campaign has been courting. Those groups are turned off by exclusionary and hate-filled rhetoric.

2. But that is a conflict because Trump and his followers have a history making racist, misogynistic, ableist, ethnocentric, homophobic, and other deplorable remarks.

In fact, to MAGA, their hatred of the other is what attracted them to Trump in the first place. He gave him permission to say the things they always wanted to say.

It hasn’t been that he has lowered taxes for the middle class because he actually raised their taxes. It hasn’t been that he has been a champion of affordable health care because he actually wants to cancel it. It’s not because he’s helped more Americans achieve the American dream of owning a home because he’s actually ruined it. It isn’t that he’s protected public lands or schools because he actually dismantled both.

Trump hasn’t done anything that would make voters’ lives better.

In fact, his leadership has emboldened the Heritage Foundation, billionaire donors, anti-union hacks, and christofascists to make Americans’ lives immeasurably worse. Project 2025 is right-wing extremists’ blueprint to:

• Enact a total ban on abortion

• Give tax breaks to corporations while raising taxes on the working class

• Eliminate unions and worker protections

• Remove hard-won rights LGBTQ+ Americans

• Force women to stay married to abusers

• End affordable health care

• Raise prescription drug prices

• Remove protections for BIPOC students and employees

Trump and Project 2025 have given MAGA voters permission to say the horrible things that they like to say like calling Kamala Harris “the DEI candidate”, implying she couldn’t have gotten the job on merit alone. Or putting bumper stickers on their trucks that read “Joe and the hoe have to go.”That is what they like about him. Trying to rein that in now is going to be like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

Photo by 莎莉 彭 on Unsplash

Good luck with that.

Personally, I’m looking forward to a Harris/Trump face off. From the AP:

Strong and intelligent women who attack him seem to get especially under Trump’s skin, said Stephanie Grisham, a 2016 campaign aide who served for a time as Trump’s White House press secretary, before breaking with him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“She’s going to get a real rise out of him,” predicted Grisham, noting that when Trump is attacked, he “punches 1,000 times harder. He’s not going to be able to help himself.”

And look, I know Democrats aren’t perfect. A woman I’m friends with who has been a career prosecutor and county attorney reminded me this morning that sexism exists on both sides of the aisle. But don’t be fooled: Republicans aren’t being proactive and encouraging their side to be mindful of how harmful those comments are.

Their own document describes the ways they want to harm women and people of color.

They want to retain power and they know they need suburban women, non-white, and young voters to do so. They're not worried about the actual harm. They're worried about losing votes.

Say what you want about Democrats. At least we don’t have to be told not to be racist/sexist.

Onward, Democracy Defenders!