Farnsworth is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington
Public opinion polls suggest that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is doing slightly better than Joe Biden was against Donald Trump, but Republican attacks against her are only now ramping up.
Even as a candidate for vice president, Harris was the target of an intense barrage of conservative attacks that claimed, among other things, that she slept her way to political prominence, a common slur against women in power. The anti-Harris rhetoric is part of what a report by the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, described as a broad pattern of gendered and sexualized attacks on prominent women in public discourse.
More recently, those comments were joined by conservative attacks branding Harris as the “border czar,” part of an effort to tie her to immigration, a hot-button topic for conservatives.
The intense attacks so far are only a fraction of what will come. Trump is skilled at both character assassination and political self-defense. Together, they translate into an exceptional ability to defeat his political rivals once they enter the presidential campaign arena.
But Harris also has sharp rhetorical skills that could make this a fierce election fight.
Trump’s alternative facts
As I discuss in my book “ Presidential Communication and Character,” Trump is highly skilled at both channeling white working-class anger into political support for himself and at convincing his supporters to disregard the former president’s own well-chronicled professional and personal failings.
Trump’s character generates enduring contempt among liberals, but those voters will back the Democratic nominee.
In 2016, Trump defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He also defeated several well-known Republican presidential hopefuls in the primary race, including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas and former Governors Jeb Bush of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
Earlier in 2024, Trump easily dispatched another round of highly experienced Republicans, most notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Like those other opponents, President Biden has long endured Trump’s personal attacks. But in 2020, Trump’s original nickname of “Sleepy Joe” failed to become as effective as his insults aimed at other politicians, and Biden’s election marked Trump’s only electoral defeat.
As the 2024 election approached, Trump and conservative voices once again demonstrated their immense influence in shaping political narratives. They have convinced many voters this year to absolve Trump for his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, ignore that he designed a Supreme Court majority to overturn Roe v. Wade and agree with him that the 2020 election was stolen.
In an even more powerful demonstration of Trump’s skills at political marketing, polls show that many voters follow Trump’s lead and condemn Biden for U.S. economic conditions that in fact are quite good.
Unemployment is low. Job growth is booming. Infrastructure projects are underway. Inflation is much lower now than it was earlier in Biden’s term, and individual retirement accounts are flush thanks to large stock market gains.
Given Trump’s public relations mastery – and the great susceptibility of many voters to his false narratives – one can marvel about how the Biden campaign had been able to endure the never-ending rhetorical assault and keep the contest as close as surveys show it had remained until recently.
During a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, 2024, Trump attacked both Biden and Harris, repeatedly calling Biden “stupid” and insulting his IQ. But Harris, Trump said, was “crazy.”
“I call her laughing Kamala,” Trump told the crowd. “You can tell a lot by a laugh. She’s crazy. She’s nuts.”
A former prosecutor against a convicted felon
With Biden dropping out of the campaign, political developments suggest Trump may be in for a taste of his own medicine.
Harris’ previous career as a U.S. senator who challenged Trump administration officials and the former president’s judicial nominees demonstrates that she is among the most effective Democratic officeholders when it comes to holding Republicans accountable.
Her career as an attorney general and a prosecutor also allows her to use law-and-order themes to fight back against America’s first convicted felon former president.
Biden’s departure may provide another major opportunity for Harris to reset the character assassination narrative, as the focus on age can now boomerang against Republicans. Trump now holds the record as the oldest major-party nominee for president, and a key issue that he used against Biden is likely to be turned back toward the former president.
For voters, it promises to be a scorched-earth campaign season.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.