Last weekend—even before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and passed the torch to his vice president, Kamala Harris—Donald Trump coined a nickname for Harris at a rally in Michigan: “Laffin’ Kamala.” (“You ever watch her laugh?” Trump asked the crowd. “She’s crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh.”) After Harris became his de facto opponent, the slew of epithets continued: trying out another nickname, Trump called her “lyin’ Kamala”; he also referred to her as “nasty,” “terrible,” “horrible,” and “mean,” as a “radical-left lunatic,” and as “the original Marxist.” (This, presumably, was news to Karl Marx, unless Trump was sticking with the “laffin’” theme and referring to Groucho.) A Trump campaign video dubbed Harris “pro-criminal,” apparently without irony. On Friday, Trump mangled the word “Kamala,” adding that he “couldn’t care less” if he mispronounces it. On Saturday, he returned to the laugh, after accusing the media of trying to turn Harris into Margaret Thatcher. “Margaret Thatcher didn’t laugh like that, did she?” he said. “If she did, she wouldn’t have been Margaret Thatcher.”
Amid all this, Trump’s allies in right-wing politics and media wielded these and other lines of attack, variously dubbing Harris a “San Francisco liberal,” a “DEI hire,” and “SOFT AS CHARMIN” on crime, while proclaiming her “weird” for her love of Venn diagrams. It’s all been part of what numerous major outlets have characterized as a wider race—or a “scramble,” “fight,” or “blitz”—to “define” Harris in the eyes of voters, a race in which Harris herself, of course, has taken part; as CNN’s Dana Bash explained on air last week, “one of the most important names of the game in politics is to define the candidate.” In this sense, it’s no surprise that the idea has been thrust to the forefront of political coverage as Harris has ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket. Nor is it new—as I wrote at the time, a strikingly similar conversation surrounded Harris after Biden picked her to be his running mate in 2020, down to Trump calling her “nasty” and media talk of a “battle” to define her. Even the Venn-diagram attack isn’t original.
But the question of definition has a deeper resonance for Harris than many other politicians; as Politico put it last week (in an article headlined “Defining Kamala Harris”), she has, over the years, been hard to pin down ideologically, leading to “wildly conflicting portrayals from the media, her Republican rivals and even those within her own party.” As I noted back in 2019, her lack of self-definition (or at least a simple, bumper-sticker-ready message) was cited in postmortems of her failed bid for the Democratic nomination; since she became vice president, we have repeatedly been told that she remains an enigma. In February 2023, the New York Times published an article with the headline “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting.” A few months later, two buzzy profiles of Harris were published on the same day. One, by Astead W. Herndon in the Times, was titled “In Search of Kamala Harris.” The other, by Elaina Plott Calabro in The Atlantic, nodded back to the Times’ February story and concluded that “a consistent theme of Harris’s career has been her struggle to tell her own story—to define herself and her political vision for voters in clear, memorable terms.”
To no small extent, such coverage has been fair. Harris has, in the past, appeared to waver ideologically (not least during her campaign for the 2020 nomination), and she has not always told a personal story in compelling ways. Politico’s Eugene Daniels, who has covered Harris closely, told my colleague Josh Hersh last week that if people feel like they don’t know who Harris is, it hasn’t always been clear “how much she wanted folks to know about her—not about how she worked and her policies, but about her.” Recently, Plott Calabro noted to Ezra Klein, of the Times, that Harris once told her that she had structured her career not around “giving lovely speeches” but interacting with constituents. “That’s great,” Plott Calabro said. “But on a national stage, there’s simply no way that the media can package that fact and sell it for you. Lovely speeches is a large part of the ballgame when you are in the White House.”
This, too, is a fair observation for the media to make. At the same time, though, there’s room for self-reflection in how the media has packaged Harris as a character, and how that has shaped perceptions of her lack of definition. If Harris hasn’t always embraced the “gauzier, more emotional elements” of politics, Plott Calabro reported, then this is in part because she seems to expect that she will be judged on the hard facts of her record, hardly an unreasonable ask in itself; when Herndon asked Harris “where she would define herself politically on a spectrum of moderate to progressive,” Harris asked him to define those terms, before adding “I’m not really into labels.” (Again, hardly unreasonable.) Last week, Herndon’s Times colleague Lydia Polgreen noted that, to the extent Harris has been cast as more progressive than she actually is, it has sometimes felt “as though ‘moderate’ is a synonym for ‘white’”; Polgreen was talking in the context of “wish-casting” about other potential candidates, but I’ve noticed this trend in some recent media coverage, too (including in the Times). Back in 2019, various critics argued that if Harris had failed to define her candidacy, it was at least in part because the political media had afforded her fewer opportunities to do so than were given to buzzier white male candidates like Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, among other claims she was held to a double standard.
If the media is not entirely—but certainly somewhat—responsible for the impression that Harris lacks definition, this reflects our role in this vein of coverage more broadly. Defining any candidate for high office is a very real political-messaging imperative that rival campaigns fight over; it’s not wrong to cover that fighting, nor its gauzier rhetorical aspects and narrative moments. But the political media does itself seek to define candidates—often out of what I see as a lazy impulse to boil complicated elections down to narratives of clear contrast. At its worst, this type of coverage can launder politicians’ attempts to define themselves or their rivals by treating these depictions as somehow a matter of settled fact.
Take, for example, Harris’s involvement in immigration policy since she became vice president. Biden tasked her with helping to address the root causes of migration from countries in Central America, a portfolio that right-wing politicians and media figures were quick to misrepresent by dubbing Harris Biden’s “border czar.” (Last week, the hard-right congresswoman Elise Stefanik drafted a resolution condemning Harris for her supposed failures under this title; when Democrats pointed out that the title was made up, the resolution was altered to note that Harris had come to be known by it “colloquially.”) This line of attack, or at least the related idea that the border is a political liability for Harris, has often crept into media coverage. (When Axios tweeted a story last week clarifying that Harris was never the “border czar,” readers pointed out that the site had previously used that exact language to describe her.) Along the way, nuance inevitably got lost, as The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer noted yesterday. It’s little wonder that, per reporting from Herndon, Plott Calabro, and others, Harris did not want the portfolio in the first place.
This is not to ask the press to soft-pedal coverage of Harris’s immigration responsibilities—the root causes of immigration deserve rigorous scrutiny, as does Harris’s work in the area—but rather to think of them as part of a complex, longer-term policy story as well as a simplified, short-term electoral one. The same is true of Harris’s perceived assets, including her record as a prosecutor in California, a matter that still merits sharp media scrutiny even if—or, perhaps, because—the media atmospherics around law and order have changed in recent years. (Harris’s law enforcement background was deemed a liability in 2019 and 2020, when many progressives branded her a “cop.”) Again, it’s not wrong to cover perceived assets and liabilities, or the work of definition to which they contribute. But our first instinct, when politicians try to define something or someone, should be to interrogate what they’re saying. At times, recent coverage of Harris has seemed to move on twin tracks: aiming to elucidate the truth of who she is, while at the same time refereeing a race to do that on our behalf.
Some of the recent coverage has sharply dissected Trump’s attacks on Harris—not least “Laffin’ Kamala”—including by noting their implied racism and misogyny. Other coverage has criticized these attacks for being muddled or simply lacking juice, echoing an observation that I made in 2020 amid a previous installment of the race to define. As I wrote then (and also on prior occasions), the stakes here are high: Trump’s penchant for bestowing nicknames on his opponents might seem trivial, but such epithets can be linguistically powerful, slipping contestable claims past our critical faculties in ways that recall the oldest traditions of human storytelling. Now, as before, our job is to engage those critical faculties rather than to play the comedy critic—deriding “Laffin’ Kamala” while waiting for a sicker burn to come into definition.
Other notable stories:
- Neal Rothschild and Sara Fischer report, for Axios, that the manic recent news cycle has led to a spike in engagement with online news, offering publishers “a much-needed reprieve from bad traffic and ratings.” Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr reports that the news cycle has energized political reporters, too, as “pure adrenaline” kicks in and “a campaign cycle that has long seemed a bit sleepy is now anything but.”
- In recent days, J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has been widely criticized (including by Jennifer Aniston) after old comments resurfaced in which he derided women who don’t have children. Now David Corn reports, for Mother Jones, that Vance once pinned negative media coverage on childless journalists, saying in 2021 that “many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults.”
- VTDigger’s Corey McDonald reports on an interesting state senate race in Vermont, where Stewart Ledbetter, a longtime broadcast journalist who retired earlier this year, is running against an incumbent slate in a Democratic primary in a progressive district. Ledbetter is running as a consensus-builder but has been criticized for not having a distinctive agenda. (ICYMI, I wrote about TV journalists who run for office in 2022.)
- Last week, the Times ran a story about voters’ thoughts on the election, but later removed comments from one voter after learning that she “had been convicted in an extortion scheme.” This, Defector’s Albert Burneko notes, was an understatement—the voter was Anna Ayala, who, among other scams, hoaxed Wendy’s by hiding a severed finger in a bowl of chili. Burneko explored what Ayala’s inclusion says about the Times.
- And the Olympics got underway on Friday, and are already proving a fount of media stories. Russia is (still) accusing the French organizers of demonizing Russian reporters. Hundreds of journalists at an Australian newspaper group went on strike on the eve of the Games, in a protest over pay. And Poland’s state broadcaster suspended a journalist who described an opening-ceremony rendition of “Imagine” as a “vision of communism.”
ICYMI: Did fact-checkers overlook signs of Biden’s decline?
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.