Donald Trump’s team is mounting a new angle of attack on Vice President Kamala Harris, and while their plan is very much connected to the campaign’s already racist rhetoric, its bigoted legacy goes back even further to the presidential election of 1988.
In the days since President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris, Trump’s team has scrambled to adapt their attacks to the new presumptive nominee. Even before Biden’s decision was officially announced, Trump had started to try out a couple lame nicknames, such as “Laughing Kamala,” and most recently “‘Dumb As a Rock’ Kamala.” But, not surprisingly, none of these have really stuck.
As such, it’s time to get serious with their mode of attack, and so Republicans are planning to take aim at Harris’s record as a district attorney in San Francisco, which she has already started to weaponize against convicted felon Trump.
One Trump adviser said the Harris cases included “several Willie Hortons,” The Bulwark reported Tuesday, referring to the racist attack ad launched against Senator Michael Dukakis during the 1988 election. The ad featured a Massachusetts inmate named Willie Horton who had stabbed a man and raped a woman while on a weekend furlough—a policy and crime for which then-Republican candidate George H.W. Bush inexplicably blamed Dukakis.
As the late, great Walter Shapiro wrote for The New Republic in 2022, “It has become a Republican cliché: When the polls look ominous, the party often conjures the image of a menacing Black man.”
The infamous Horton ads encouraged race-based politics by playing into racial stereotypes linking Black men with crime, to fearmonger about a lawless Democratic presidency. Trump has been able to exploit and exacerbate this trend within the Republican Party with his own lies about immigrant crime rates. Now, it seems the Republicans are plotting to launch a similar attack against Harris.
For some Republicans, it seems the racist Willie Hortonesque smack talk has already begun. During an interview on CNN Tuesday, Senator Tom Cotton called Harris a “failed San Francisco liberal that’s wrong for America,” and said there were many cases in which she had been “weak on crime” and let “thousands” of criminals walk free.
Cotton also referred to one specific Harris case, which is likely to start appearing in Republican talking points. In 2004, Harris declined to seek the death penalty for the killer of police officer Isaac Espinoza, despite a pressure campaign from several California Democrats.
Renata Espinoza, the police officer’s widow, said Harris hadn’t called her before announcing the decision. Harris had “just taken justice from us. From Isaac,” Espinoza told CNN in 2019. “She was only thinking of herself.”
The prosecution worked to paint David Hill, who was convicted of fatally shooting Espinoza and sentenced to life without parole, as a hardened gangster, and even cited his own rap lyrics in their case against him.
CNN’s John Berman had reminded Cotton that when Trump ran for president in 2020, his team had attacked Harris for just the opposite: being too tough on criminals.
In August 2020, former Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson claimed Harris “fought to keep inmates locked up in overcrowded prisons so they could be used for cheap labor, she championed laws that put parents in jail for truancy and prosecuted the mentally ill.”
Now, Trump’s team has decided Harris’s record is part of their “bucket of paint to define her at a time of our choosing,” Trump’s campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita told The Bulwark.
