Harris Is Attacking Trump as a Conventional Republican

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, October 24, 2024

 

According to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, her Republican opponent plans to “give billionaires massive tax cuts year after year” and “cut corporate taxes by over $1 trillion even as they pull in record profits.”

 

Another of Harris’s television ads chides Donald Trump for “killing” Roe v. Wade, the half-century-old judicial mandate making abortion a human right. In speeches, she derides him for wanting to close the Department of Education, which she says “funds our public schools.”

 

All of which has Trump-skeptical traditional conservatives saying, “Wait, that guy sounds pretty good.”

 

A large part of Harris’s strategy in the final weeks of the campaign is to give permission to Reagan- and Bush-era conservatives to cross over and support her. She has been on a tour of swing states with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, attempting to convince voters on the right that pulling the lever for a standard liberal progressive is more honorable than rewarding someone who attempted to undo the last presidential election. Harris also recently appeared on Fox News, enduring a combative interview with Bret Baier in the hopes she could reach the sliver of Fox viewers who are ideologically conservative but can’t stand Trump.

 

Yet as she tries to seduce TradCons, she routinely attacks Trump for the things they like the most about him. He is a wildly nontraditional candidate, spending time on the campaign trail talking about the . . . uh . . . size of the club Arnold Palmer used to carry around in his bag, accusing immigrants of snacking on golden retrievers, disseminating lies about hurricane-recovery aid, claiming he’s a better president than Abraham Lincoln, and hosting 40-minute dance parties at the end of his campaign speeches.

 

But Harris seems to think the way to beat Trump is with more traditional attacks referencing taxes and abortion, as if she were running against George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, or Paul Ryan.

 

Take, for example, a recent Harris ad that attacks “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda.” Set aside the fact that it is not, in fact, Trump’s agenda — it was issued by the Heritage Foundation, the once-conservative think tank whose denizens now want to cozy up to Trump by codifying his vibe in policy proposals. Trump has disavowed any knowledge of what is in it (while still calling some of its goals “ridiculous”), and given his light reading habits, when Trump says he has not read something, it is wise to believe him.

 

The Project 2025 plan does include some preposterous proposals (for instance, America’s porn stars have banded together to oppose its ban on adult movies, which would shrink Trump’s dating pool). But for the most part it’s a regurgitation of many long-standing, traditional conservative plans.

 

For instance, it contains the proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, a bureaucracy that has had a target on its back since it was created in 1980. Democrats bleat that killing the department would effectively end education, but presumably children were educated prior to the election of Ronald Reagan and would continue to learn things after the department ceased to exist. (Education remains primarily a state and local endeavor, with very little federal involvement.)

 

It also recycles a good chunk of the core issues on which Republicans have campaigned for decades: opposition to climate-change proposals, support for public funding of school choice, increasing military spending, and the like.

 

Beyond Project 2025, Harris and her supporters spend a great deal of time attacking Trump for appointing the Supreme Court justices responsible for overturning Roe. But Democrats are wildly overplaying their hand on abortion. While they pretend that Republicans are out to ban birth control and in vitro fertilization and make all abortions illegal, the Roe reversal is working exactly as it was supposed to: Voters now have a say on abortion policy in their states, and many legislatures are working to find consensus as to when abortions should be permissible.

 

This, of course, is far less extreme than the Harris position that the law or the Supreme Court — whichever suits the moment — should mandate legal abortions up through the ninth month. Voters have very complicated views on abortion, but late-term abortion is an issue on which most citizens agree: A 2023 Gallup poll showed that only 22 percent of Americans believe third-trimester abortions should be legal.

 

Further, Harris continues to declare that Trump’s 2017 tax cuts were a big giveaway to “millionaires and billionaires,” when in fact 80 percent of all taxpayers received a tax cut, with the average taxpayer receiving a $1,500 reduction in taxes. According to IRS statistics, the largest share of the tax cut went to the bottom 75 percent of earners, who saw their taxes drop by 9.3 percent, while the top 1 percent of earners saw a cut of 0.04 percent. Most of the tax cut expires at the end of 2025, and if the Harris administration fails to reauthorize it, taxes are expected to rise by $400 billion.

 

In any event, these are all issues that have been hashed out in presidential elections for half a century, if not longer. Harris is playing on a traditional football field, while Trump has built a stadium all his own.

 

Working against Harris is the fact that many of her traditional attacks on Trump fail because of their blatant hypocrisy. She has begun calling Trump’s proposal to raise tariffs on foreign imports a “sales tax on the American people,” arguing that the “Trump tax” would cost middle-class families over $4,000 a year.

 

It is true that Americans would bear the burden of Trump’s tariffs. But President Joe Biden not only kept the Trump administration tariffs going, he expanded the base of those tariffs.

 

So by Kamala Harris’s own definition, she’s got a fever and the only prescription is more sales taxes. Harris attacking Trump for proposing tariffs is like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attacking people for being unvaccinated.

 

Donald Trump’s supporters revere him because they believe he is the first honest politician — in that he is transparently dishonest. Trump is the guy they believe every other elected official secretly is, the difference being that Trump is proud to be obnoxious, dishonest, and grotesque. He is the real truth of politics.

 

Democrats, on the other hand, somehow believe that Trump’s erratic behavior has been under-covered by the media. If only the New York Times had somehow devoted more words to Trump’s calling Harris “Kamabla,” she would be ten points ahead.

 

But those people hoping that, in the last two weeks before the election, voters will finally have an epiphany about Trump’s deranged behavior should first look to Harris’s own campaign. It’s been a bore. And half the American electorate is having a ball watching the guy in the apron and red tie leaning out the drive-thru window.