Alameen Templeton
Donald Trump has the best words, the best friends – you can ask them; they’ll tell ya: we’re the greatest, it’s going to be beautiful – and, it seems, the best opponents.
Which is why Kamala Harris just won’t do; she’s not “black enough”.
Trump took his concerns about his shape-shifting opponent to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago Tuesday night. Perhaps he wished to defer to their expert opinion.
More probably, it was a deliberate ploy to chug more napalm into the racist firestorm that has become the meatgrinder nexus at the heart of the battle for American identity.
Commenting on Harris’s mixed Indian and African roots, Trump blandly laid on the table his Kamala problem: “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way, and then of a sudden she made a turn and she went … she became a black person.”
It’s like Trump’s worst, trans-wokenism nightmare, but he can’t wake up from it.
And there’s plenty of ammunition from his past, very public comments just lying around and it may provide Harris with the necessary gas to get her over the finishing line and into the White House.
Trump knows Harris has never been one to cosy up to the hairier side of black American politics. In the last election, her credentials weren’t seen as being strong enough to register among black voters and that is the weakest link Trump has taken aim at in Chicago, the heart of northern US black politics.
He’s not concerned about the upper echelons of the Democrats’ “woke” hierarchy. Republican pollsters believe the rarified air they breathe is too far disconnected from “the street” – and that is where Trump’s aiming.
Not at the heart or the mind or even the wallet, but at the guts and groin.
GOP pollsters in the last election successfully branded Harris as, using South African parlance, “a coconut” – someone who’s black on the outside and white in the middle. She’d been chosen for obvious identity-political reasons – black enough to mollify liberal, white voters, but not enough to alarm them.
But 2024 is a different ball game. The deep chasm dividing red-and-blue America is possibly even deeper than it was on January 6 four years ago when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and Trump tried to overturn the election result.
He and Harris are in a life-and-death struggle over a few, crucial percentage points. It is periphery of the US political discourse that is likely to be the decider and that is happening in downtown Detroit, in the Chicago projects and uptown Harlem.
With the dividing line between winning and losing the election stuck near 50% for both parties, it’s the marginal populations, the black, Muslim and Hispanic voters, who’re going to make the difference.
Trump knows his appeal in these quarters is almost non-existent and, besides, they’re not as big donors to his election war chest like the Adelsons and other Aipac members.
Perversely, Trump knows Musim voters in Dearborn, bordering Chicago, which is home to the biggest concentration of Muslims in America, have already decided they’re going to spoil their votes rather than line up behind Biden.
His unquestioning, blind support for Israel during the Gaza genocide has alienated them too far to return to the Democrat camp.
Or have they?
While Trump’s camp is determined to make Harris, who hovered close and loyally behind Biden’s shoulder throughout his presidency, own every bit of his legacy, she has also been carefully ticking other boxes that could tip the marginal vote in her favour.
Republicans are determined to remind voters Harris reassured them time and again Biden’s mental faculties were fine. Now, after the first presidential debate, he’s out of the race and cruelly exposed as drowning feebly under his presidential obligations.
Harris supported the Ukraine war, another mess Trump has promised to fix “in a day”, that is going nowhere and is costing US taxpayers billions. She’s also been behind Biden on Gaza.
Gaza is threatening to bleed thousands of younger voters away from the Democrats following the campus protests that have pilloried Biden for his rock-solid support for Israel.
Harris has chided Israel repeatedly, but softly, over the months. Perhaps, that might be enough to soften Muslim hearts to putting an X next to her name.
Trump will try ensure she “owns” her Biden legacy while worrying away at her other supporting legs, the black and Hispanic vote.
Which is why he took aim at Harris’s biracial roots Wednesday night; he has to break her support in a foreign land where he’s not welcome.
So, he can’t appeal to their minds, because his racism is just too apparent. The corollary is he’ll never appeal to their hearts. Their love or admiration are destined to remain strangers.
But he can reach out to their fear and prejudice, to their baser instincts; that’s his speciality, after all.
And that was what he was appealing to Wednesday night – Harris is “not black enough”, she’s a coconut, an Oreo, a Trojan Horse, a sellout, a pimp.
It’s classic Trump, it’s classic American. Allah help us.
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