Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is pushing two simultaneous narratives about Vice President Kamala Harris that, if they actually happened to be true, would just cancel each other out.
Harris and President Joe Biden joined families of three Americans who had been imprisoned in Russia at Joint Base Andrew in Maryland late Thursday night. Biden had helped to facilitate the release of the former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.
Despite the remarkable homecoming, MAGA used the occasion to push its own conspiracy theories about Biden and Harris. RNC Research, an account on X run by Trump’s campaign, posted a video of Biden and Harris on the tarmac.
“Kamala watches Biden shuffle aimlessly across the tarmac and nearly trip up the stairs of the plane (from which the passengers had long disembarked),” the account wrote. “This is the obvious decline Kamala covered up in her thirst for power—the scandal of the century.”
Kamala watches Biden shuffle aimlessly across the tarmac and nearly trip up the stairs of the plane (from which the passengers had long disembarked).
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 2, 2024
This is the obvious decline Kamala covered up in her thirst for power — the scandal of the century. pic.twitter.com/bpPYuWQmvN
There’s a lot of problems with this post, so let’s go through them one by one.The so-called “decline” the post refers to was Biden boarding the plane to thank the pilots, not wandering into an empty plane with Harris left dumbfounded on the tarmac.
In one sentence, Trump’s campaign suggested both that Harris covered up Biden’s aging to keep him in office, and simultaneously hoped that she would be given the reins. In terms of fictionalized evil schemes, one can’t both plot to keep the leader in power, and also plot to oust him. Complicity or coup? MAGA Republicans need to pick one bedtime story or the other, but there just isn’t enough time for both.
This post is one small window into the Trump campaign’s scrambled efforts to shift their rhetoric around Harris, whom they are now forced to blame for everything they once tried to pin on Biden. Thursday’s prisoner swap presented a particularly sore spot for Trump, who seemed pretty miffed he wasn’t in on the complex negotiations—but lashing out like this is particularly pathetic.
