If Trump’s edge has been plain speaking, he’s about to meet his match

Some of my relatives in New Jersey have liked one thing above all about Donald J. Trump. As one put it, “he talks like us.” The meaning: unlike politicians whose insults are measured and almost diplomatic, whose criticisms on sensitive topics are muted, the blunt New Yorker “tells it like it is.”

Unburdened even by basic manners, the former president is given to fixing labels on opponents such as “lightweight,” “dumb” or “dummy,” “a dope” or “dopey,” “weak,” “a loser,” “boring” and so on. Like a grade school bully, he bandies about terms such as “Crooked Hillary,” “Crooked Joe,” “Pencil Neck,” “Birdbrain” and “Little Marco.”

Well, Trump may meet his match in Kamala Harris. Addressing her campaign staff, the vice president said that, as a longtime prosecutor, she dealt with perpetrators of all sorts: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Diplomatic? Hardly. Blunt to a fault or coarse? Well, no. Harris is too smart and too — well, adult — for that. On point, though? Unquestionably.

To be sure, Harris’s prosecutor-versus-predator theme isn’t exactly new. She indirectly called Trump a “predator” in the 2020 campaign in her comments in the virtual Democratic National Convention. But, with his 34 felony convictions since then, along with a fraud judgment of $454 million against him and the $88.3 million in a pair of judgments against him for his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, her barbs underscoring Trump’s venality hit home much harder now.

Harris won’t have to sink to Trump’s schoolyard level. Don’t look for her to call him “Dumb as a Rock,” as he, flailing for a label, said of her. Of course, she could do so, with ample evidence: a former prof of Trump’s at Wharton reportedly said of him: “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!” and his former White House colleagues have called him an “idiot,” “dope” and “moron.”

But she won’t hold back, either. It’s clear that the gloves are off in this race and Harris and her compadres won’t be anywhere near as politic as former President Biden has been in dealing with Trump and his vice presidential hopeful, JD Vance. Already, potential Democratic vice presidential nominee Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has called Vance “a phony.”

And just how this all plays out will be fascinating to watch. Despite the relative genteelness of most recent presidential races, strong language has a long history in American political campaigns. A promoter of Thomas Jefferson, for instance, in 1800 referred to the nation’s second president, John Adams, as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” And in 1828, supporters of Andrew Jackson called John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, “a pimp,” accusing him of providing women to the Russian czar while serving as the U.S. minister to Russia. For their part, Adams’s supporters caricatured Jackson’s mother as a prostitute.

In today’s take-no-prisoners contest, the more Harris and her colleagues provoke Trump, the more he may be tempted to respond like the thin-skinned brute he is. As The New York Times has suggested, the attacks could provoke him to drop even lower, particularly because women, Blacks and other minorities seem to especially infuriate him. Recall that “Birdbrain” was his term for Nikki Haley, “Pocahontas” was his moniker for Elizabeth Warren, and “Crazy Nancy” was Nancy Pelosi. Trump used the less elegant “that bitch” for former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Certainly, obvious racism and sexism — if Trump and his backers descend into them — will play well with some of the former president’s supporters, perhaps even with many. Indeed, we already are hearing strains of both in comments such as that of Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, who called Harris a “DEI vice president” and “a DEI hire,” invoking the common right-wing attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs at universities. Another Republican, Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, said the Democratic Party backed Harris only “because of her ethnic background,” while one right-wing commentator claimed she is not a natural-born citizen because her parents were immigrants (she was born in Oakland, Calif.).

The theme of such critics will be that Harris got where she is as a kind of affirmative action baby. Never mind that Harris is the gifted daughter of an economics professor and a cancer researcher, and that she earned a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley. They will ignore the fact that she served as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office from 1990 to 1998, that she was elected in 2004 as district attorney of San Francisco, that in 2010 she was elected as California’s attorney general and then, in 2016, was elected as a U.S. Senator from California. They will play down her work on the Senate’s judiciary and intelligence committees, on which she sat until Biden tapped her to join him in the 2020 race.

Even as he seems increasingly addled by age, Trump may be too clever – or too well-advised – to be flagrantly racist and sexist in his dealings with Harris. While others may be more cloddish, Trump knows just how to stop short of being fully outrageous, how to avoid being too explicit.

Recall that Trump saw “some very fine people on both sides,” among the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017. Remember that in 2020 he told a far-right extremist group to “stand back and stand by.” Recall that he urged on insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021, telling them to “show strength” in the march on the Capitol, after telling them to “be there, will be wild!” And remember that Trump pressed Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to “find 11,780 votes” to try to overturn his loss in the state in 2020.

But, if Harris gets under his skin, Trump could well go too far. How will mainstream voters – particularly women – respond then? How will they react to dog whistles about race and gender? How will they react to more explicit assaults on those grounds by Trump devotees?

Harris is brilliantly positioned to take advantage of such attacks. And she is well-seated to launch far more precise – and well-founded – volleys at Trump. His flaws are legion and we can expect that she will expose, dissect and pound away at all of them.

Indeed, as my relatives may find, Harris will “talk like us” as she shines a bright, bold light on Trump’s foulness. But she may do so far more sharply — and effectively — than Trump ever could.