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President Joe Biden appointed "Kamala Harris to be his border czar to deal with illegal immigration … Harris was put in charge of stopping illegal immigration."
Saturday, August 31, 2024
Social Psychology Sheds Light on the Troubles of Trump Supporters | Psychology Today
Social Psychology Sheds Light on the Troubles of Trump Supporters
Followers of President Trump are in a psychologically difficult situation.
Kermit the Frog used to lament, “It’s not easy being green.” Well, it’s not easy being a fan of President Trump these days, and I’m not referring to his sinking poll numbers. There are deeper problems, issues that are elucidated and illuminated by some now-classic insights of social psychology. To whit:
1. Cognitive Dissonance. First explored and named by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, it’s a simple yet powerful concept. Basically, people find it mentally painful (dissonant) to hold two contrary notions at the same time, especially if they refer to one’s self-perception. Most of us think of ourselves as, if not brilliant, at least acceptably smart. What to do if we find ourselves doing something stupid? One possibility is to deny that we did it. Another (easier to pull off) is to deny that it is stupid; otherwise, we’re stuck with some unpleasant dissonance. And so, many people go to great lengths to justify an action, tying themselves into some extraordinary knots to keep up appearances—even if just to themselves.
In their book, Mistakes Were Made, But Not by Me, psychologists Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris tell some revealing stories. For example, members of the doomsday cult Heaven’s Gate believed that the Hale Bopp comet would be followed by an alien spaceship that would rescue true believers such as themselves from imminent catastrophe. They pooled their money and bought a fancy telescope with which to observe the great event but shortly thereafter attempted to return the telescope, claiming it was defective because they couldn’t see the spaceship. And after that, they died by suicide, but not because they were denied getting their money back.
Trump believers may be similarly stuck. They have hitched their conceptual wagon to their leader’s claim that COVID isn’t serious, that the US is doing a “great job” defeating it, and that basic public health responses such as social distancing and masks aren’t very important. All these claims are no more real than the nonexistent rocket ship Heaven’s Gaters. Admittedly, they haven’t directly committed suicide, but their actions are clearly dangerous to self and others, and in some cases, tantamount to suicide. Anything to avoid cognitive dissonance.
2. The Marshmallow Test. Here is another well-established social psych concept, although one that has been critiqued in certain respects. But for our purposes, let’s take it at face value. The basic idea, developed by Walter Mischel, is that a young child is offered one marshmallow and told that if they refrain from eating it for, say, 10 minutes, they will then get two. The experimenter then leaves the room and, upon returning, notes whether the child has eaten the treat, or showed restraint. Each subject having been thus scored, they are examined years—ideally, decades—later, with the basic finding that those who delayed gratification did better on a variety of socio-economic measures: higher educational attainment, more social and economic success, and so forth.
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The bottom line for our times is that much of the U.S., notably the Trump devotees, have resoundingly failed the Marshmallow Test. Encouraged by their leader, and giving full reign to their marshmallow craving, they just couldn’t bear the delay urged by responsible public health authorities. They eagerly “opened up,” and now they, and their potentially more responsible fellow Americans, are paying the price, as COVID cases spike in those states and communities that lacked suitable restraint.
3. Obedience to Authority. Another renowned social psych insight comes from the famous study conducted by Stanley Milgram in which a large proportion of otherwise normal and presumably empathic volunteers, who thought they were participating in a teaching experiment, were found willing to subject their “experimental subjects” to what would have been painful and even possibly lethal electric shocks. Of course, the volunteers were themselves the real subjects and the “shocks” weren’t genuine. Milgram's research, conducted in the aftermath of the Second World War and Hitler’s death camps, sought to illuminate whether the willingness of seemingly “good Germans” to go along with the Nazi “final solution,” was an aberration or somehow related to a flaw in the German national character (whatever that means).
Milgram’s disconcerting finding—confirmed in various ways by other researchers—was that obedience to authority is, alas, widespread. It is unknown what proportion of border agents and ICE personnel are Trump supporters, but a reasonable guess suggests that it is relatively high; if so, then it is not surprising that so many have obediently participated in cruelly separating families, and subjecting even young children to conditions suggestive of concentration camps (although thankfully, not literal genocide).
4. The Frustration-Aggression Connection. Dollard et al demonstrated many years ago that there is a deep connection between frustration and aggression. Although it is clear that not all frustration leads to aggression, and not all aggression is generated by frustration, the correspondence has remained robust. One of the most potent political appeals of candidate and now President Trump has been to the frustration of his followers: frustration that “their country” is being taken over by others who are ethnically, religiously, socially, and in various other ways different from themselves, that for the first time in American history, the prospect no longer beckons that the children of the white working-class have prospects that are less appealing than their own, that they themselves have not been receiving the deference they believe they deserve, and so forth.
In summary: frustrations galore. And not surprisingly, Trump’s appeal to his frustrated base has relied heavily on his own expressed aggression: lock her up, don’t take care to avoid head injuries when you throw a suspect into a police van, punch protestors (I’ll pay your legal bills if you do). In short, aggression as a response to and outlet for frustration.
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Sad to say, there is more, such as the “fundamental attribution error,” whereby behavior by others viewed as undesirable (e.g., Black Lives Matter protesters) is seen as indicating their nasty, violent, unpatriotic nature, thereby justifying a response (e.g., violent and abusive treatment by police, National Guard, and even the regular U.S. military of overwhelmingly nonviolent people exercising their constitutional rights as something regrettably forced upon “us,” the good guys).
Also the curious susceptibility of many people to charismatic “strong man" leaders, which risks inducing them to follow these leaders even to their own detriment. Most of Donald Trump’s policies have in fact done great harm to the well-being of many of his most ardent supporters, whereupon only a small minority have been inclined or able to separate themselves from their adherence.
I am not optimistic that those Americans whose psychology has rendered them most captive to President Trump will disenthrall themselves. Asked why the great majority of Republican office-holders continue to express—at least publicly—support for the president, a senior Republican strategist (who insisted on anonymity) answered that it was “a choice between staying on this hell-ship or jumping overboard and drowning.”
Trump Contorts Himself on Abortion in Search of Political Gain
Trump Contorts Himself on Abortion in Search of Political Gain
“The former president is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy shifts as he deems necessary to win in November, vexing some social conservatives.
At the age of 53, in a 1999 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Donald J. Trump described himself as “very pro-choice.”
In 2011, without any explanation about the change, he informed a packed room at a conservative conference that he was now “pro-life.”
In 2016, as a Republican candidate for president, he told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews that he had become so ardently opposed to abortion rights that he would even support punishments for women who got abortions. He did not realize that this position went too far even for the social conservatives to whom he was trying to pander, and he quickly reversed himself.
The 2024 version of Mr. Trump is once again tying himself in knots — but this time the stakes could not be higher.
The latest example came on Friday, when Mr. Trump — nearly a full day after his campaign had to clean up his suggestion that he might support a Florida ballot measure allowing abortion up to 24 weeks following backlash from social conservatives — told Fox News that he would vote against it.
Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.
It is through that narrow political lens that Mr. Trump has been weighing the subject, despite his role in reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion decision.
The results have been confusing and fluid, a contradictory mess of policy statements as he has once again tried to rebrand himself on an issue that many of his supporters view in strict moral terms, and had come to believe that he did, too.
Mr. Trump’s shifting views have been especially difficult for social conservatives to navigate. Some anti-abortion leaders in his orbit have tried lobbying him to align his public position with theirs. Many others are staying quiet and sticking by him, hoping that what he is saying now is just an act to get elected and that, if he does get elected, he will again govern as “the most pro-life president” in American history.
“I don’t think he’s losing support, but no question, his acquiescence is confusing to people,” said Chad Connelly, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party who leads the nonprofit Faith Wins and has a following of hundreds of pastors.
However, he added that the contrast between Vice President Kamala Harris’s actions “versus Trump’s words” meant social conservatives would “look back and see the most pro-life president in American history.”
Still, even by Mr. Trump’s standards, the past few weeks have been head-spinning for people trying to keep track of his slippery social conservatism.
In 2016, Mr. Trump won with the help of a socially conservative running mate, Mike Pence, and with a promise that he would appoint justices who would end Roe. Publicly, Mr. Trump has repeatedly bragged about doing just that, and has falsely claimed that Democrats wanted it as much as Republicans did.
In private, Mr. Trump was agitated by the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, according to a person close to him, many of which tied him to Project 2025, an effort by people supportive of Mr. Trump to develop policy proposals for him if he wins that include restrictive ideas for reproductive measures. He was especially bothered by Ms. Harris’s assertions that a second Trump term would further imperil abortion rights.
He felt so defensive about the subject that on the morning of Aug. 23, the day after Ms. Harris’s speech, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social a sentence that sounded as if it could have come from the head of Planned Parenthood rather than a Republican candidate for president.
“My Administration,” he wrote, “will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
Asked to comment, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, maintained in an emailed statement that Mr. Trump “has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion and has been very clear that he will not sign a federal ban when he is back in the White House.”
Privately, Mr. Trump has been all over the place. He told advisers in the spring that he was inclined to come out in favor of a 16-week national abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, but that he was waiting until the Republican presidential primaries were over. After reviewing polling, he backtracked and said abortion should be left to the states, adding that he was “proud” to have overturned Roe.
But he has not left it to the states.
He has intervened repeatedly in opposition to social conservatives. He has criticized various state abortion measures as overly harsh. In 2023, he condemned Florida’s six-week abortion ban, signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis, as a “terrible mistake.” This year, he said an Arizona high court ruling that outlawed abortion went too far, and he successfully pressured Republicans in the State Legislature to address it.
And on Thursday, he said in an interview with NBC News that women in Florida needed to be given more time than just six weeks to decide whether they want to have an abortion, and that he still could not say how he would vote in that state’s referendum on abortion in November.
In response to Mr. Trump’s most recent criticism of the Florida ban, the conservative National Review published an article titled, “Trump Stabs Florida Pro-Lifers in the Front.”
Tim Chapman, a conservative who leads Advancing American Freedom, a group created by Mr. Pence, posted a memo to the website X on Friday about the Florida amendment, which would protect abortion up to 24 weeks.
In the memo, Mr. Chapman said, “Sadly, President Trump has said that six weeks is ‘too short,’” adding that Mr. Trump misunderstood how the measure would increase abortion access.
“It almost seems to me like this is improvisational politics,” said Erick Erickson, the founder of the conservative website RedState, of Mr. Trump’s spate of recent statements. “There’s not really a plan — he’s ‘Live at the Improv,’ which is a problem for this.”
Mr. Trump has felt emboldened to cast aside the leaders of the social conservative movement, confident in the knowledge that they have no place else to go, and that evangelical voters increasingly self-identify on cultural grounds these days. He is further helped by the fact that his criminal prosecutions have bonded the evangelical base to him even tighter — a bond that may survive any policy transgression.
At the Republican National Convention in July, Mr. Trump ordered the watering-down of the abortion language in the party’s platform. And recently his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, went on “Meet the Press” and said Mr. Trump would veto any national abortion ban that came to his desk. And Mr. Trump has added Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both former Democrats who have supported abortion rights in the past, as honorary co-chairs of his transition team.
Mr. Trump has tried to maintain a strategic ambiguity on abortion-related issues. He told Time magazine in April that he had “pretty strong views” on how a second-term Trump administration would regulate the abortion pill mifepristone and said he would announce his policy “probably over the next week.” Four months have passed, and he still has not clarified his position.
He had little understanding of in vitro fertilization, but when the issue was explained to him, he decided he would brand himself as a champion of I.V.F., again in opposition to some social conservatives who object to the destruction of human embryos. This week, Mr. Trump went even further, declaring without any policy detail that as president he would make the expensive I.V.F. treatments free for all Americans — an initiative that would put him to the left of many Democrats and would add billions to the national debt.
Because of his efforts to appeal to all sides, Mr. Trump’s campaign has often had to clean up his statements. After his interview with NBC News on Thursday, his spokeswoman, Ms. Leavitt, issued a statement saying that Mr. Trump had not yet said how he would vote on Florida’s abortion measure.
“He simply reiterated,” Ms. Leavitt said, “that he believes six weeks is too short.”
Mr. Trump ultimately said on Friday that he would vote no on the measure, which would preserve the six-week ban in Florida. He has still not said how many weeks he considers the right amount.
Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman“
Friday, August 30, 2024
President Joe Biden appointed "Kamala Harris to be his border czar to deal with illegal immigration … Harris was put in charge of stopping illegal immigration."
Vice President Kamala Harris waves as she boards Air Force Two after a campaign event July 23, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP)
'Border czar'? Kamala Harris assigned to tackle immigration's causes, not border security
Vice President Kamala Harris might soon get a new official title: 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. In the meantime, Republicans have revived a title they gave her in 2021: "border czar."
Claims that President Joe Biden named Harris the "border czar" and that she is responsible for overseeing U.S. border enforcement gained prominence at the Republican National Convention as the party sought to link her to his immigration policy.
The refrain intensified once Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. It was echoed in ads and by Trump campaign surrogates, including Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee.
"Here’s Biden appointing Kamala Harris to be his border czar to deal with illegal immigration," a narrator says in a video the Republican National Committee posted on its X account, @GOP. "And here are a record number of illegal immigrants — 10 million and counting — flooding over the border after Harris was put in charge of stopping illegal immigration."
We’ve repeatedly fact-checked claims about the number of people entering the U.S. illegally under Biden. The federal data tracks how many times officials encountered a person trying to cross the southern border, but it doesn’t reflect the number of people let in. And if one person tries to cross the border multiple times, that counts as multiple encounters, even if it’s the same person.
For this fact-check, we’re focused on the scope of Harris’ border responsibilities.
"Border Czar Kamala Harris' reversal of President Trump's immigration policies has created an unprecedented and illegal immigration, humanitarian and national security crisis on our southern border," Trump campaign National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told PolitiFact in a statement.
But Biden didn’t put Harris in charge of overseeing border security.
In a meeting with Harris in March 2021, Biden said Harris would lead U.S. diplomatic efforts and work with officials in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to stem migration to the U.S. Biden said that when he was vice president, he "got a similar assignment" and that the Obama administration secured $700 million to help countries in Central America.
"One of the ways we learned is that if you deal with the problems in country, it benefits everyone. It benefits us, it benefits the people, and it grows the economies there," Biden said then.
Biden asked Harris "to be the chief diplomatic officer with Central American countries" and address the root causes that make people leave their home countries, said Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director for the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
Managing the border "has always been" the Homeland Security secretary’s role, Mittelstadt said.
Harris’ responsibility: Address foreign issues that contribute to migration
Biden tasked Harris with addressing the root causesinfluencing people’s decisions to migrate to the United States.
"I’ve asked her … to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border," Biden said in March 2021.
Biden held a similar role as vice president to former President Barack Obama. In a 2015 New York Times opinion piece, Biden said he would work with the Northern Triangle’s leaders on security, anti-corruption and investment efforts in the region.
"Donald Trump’s administration didn’t really sustain this strategy, but what Harris sought to revive in 2021 ran along the same lines," said Adam Isacson, defense oversight director at Washington Office on Latin America, a group advocating for human rights in the Americas.
Within weeks of Biden’s remarks about Harris’ role, Republicans including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., began calling Harris the "border czar" often in tandem with pointing out she had not yet been to the border.
In April 2021, when a reporter asked Harris whether she would visit the border, she said that her role is addressing the factors that make people leave their home countries, not managing the border.
FEATURED FACT-CHECK
"The president has asked (Homeland Security) Secretary (Alejandro) Mayorkas to address what is going on at the border. And he has been working very hard at that, and it’s showing some progress because of his hard work," Harris said at an event. "I have been asked to lead the issue of dealing with root causes in the Northern Triangle, similar to what the then-vice president did many years ago."
Harris said she’d focus on economic struggles, violence, corruption and food insecurity in the countries.
In June 2021, Harris visited El Paso, Texas, with Mayorkas. They outlined their responsibilities to reporters. Harris said she was addressing "the root causes of migration, predominantly out of Central America," and Mayorkas said, "It is my responsibility as the Secretary of Homeland Security to address the security and management of our border."
Vice President Kamala Harris holds a press conference June 25, 2021, at the airport after her tour of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Central Processing Center in El Paso, Texas. (AP)
But this distinction didn’t stop critics from linking Harris with U.S.-Mexico border security.
"The administration’s messaging on this in mid-2021 was not as clear as it should have been," Isacson said. "But at no time did Harris or the White House state that her duties included the U.S.-Mexico border, or border security."
What has Harris done to address immigration’s ‘root causes’?
Immigration experts said it’s hard to measure Harris’ success in her role, and that a "root causes" approach implies that the results will be seen long term, not immediately.
In July 2021, the administration published a strategy, with Harris writing the lead message, for confronting the factors that drive migration in Central America. The plan focused on economic insecurity, corruption, human rights, criminal gang violence and gender-based violence.
In March 2024, the administration said it secured more than $5.2 billion in private sector investments to the region. However, only about $1 billion has been distributed, the Partnership for Central America, a group working with the administration, reported.
The White House said the investments have generated more than 70,000 new jobs in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, provided job training to 1 million people and expanded digital access to 4.5 million people.
"Still, her engagement on this issue has been sporadic," Isacson said. "She has not traveled very often to the region or otherwise sought to make ‘root causes in Central America’ a central theme of her vice presidency."
Illegal immigration at the U.S. southern border from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador has dropped since 2021. Encounters with people from other countries, Venezuela, have risen.
"But it’s hard to prove that U.S. assistance is a central reason" for the Northern Triangle countries’ decline, Isacson said.
The issues pushing people to leave Central American countries "are extremely complex and require deep restructuring of so much in those societies," said Cecilia Menjivar, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who specializes on immigration. "So it’s very difficult for one person to change all that, even if it is a powerful person."
Immigration patterns at the U.S.-Mexico border have more to do with conditions in Latin American countries than "any U.S. policy," Mittelstadt said.
For example, a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela has displaced nearly 8 million people since 2014, according to the United Nations. Political, economic and security crises in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Ecuador have also led to more migration from these countries, Mittelstadt said.
In contrast, immigration encounters with people from El Salvador have dropped in past years, partly because of the country’s crime crackdown.
Our ruling
The Republican National Committee said Biden appointed Harris "to be his border czar to deal with illegal immigration...Harris was put in charge of stopping illegal immigration."
Biden tasked Harris with addressing the root causes that drive migration to the United States. He did not task her with controlling who and how many people enter the southern U.S. border. That's the Homeland Security secretary’s responsibility.
Experts say that seeing the results of addressing root causes driving people out of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — violence, economic insecurity and corruption — takes time.
The statement contains an element of truth, but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
Why Trump’s Arlington Debacle Is So Serious - The former president violated one of America’s most sacred places.
Why Trump’s Arlington Debacle Is So Serious
The former president violated one of America’s most sacred places.
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“The section of Arlington National Cemetery that Donald Trump visited on Monday is both the liveliest and the most achingly sad part of the grand military graveyard, set aside for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Section 60, young widows can be seen using clippers and scissors to groom the grass around their husbands’ tombstones as lots of children run about.
Karen Meredith knows the saddest acre in America only too well. The California resident’s son, First Lieutenant Kenneth Ballard, was the fourth generation of her family to serve as an Army officer. He was killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, and laid to rest in Section 60. She puts flowers on his gravesite every Memorial Day. “It’s not a number, not a headstone,” she told me. “He was my only child.”
The sections of Arlington holding Civil War and World War I dead have a lonely and austere beauty. Not Section 60, where the atmosphere is sanctified but not somber—too many kids, Meredith recalled from her visits to her son’s burial site. “We laugh, we pop champagne. I have met men who served under him, and they speak of him with such respect. And to think that this man”—she was referring to Trump—“came here and put his thumb up—”
She fell silent for a moment on the telephone, taking a gulp of air. “I’m trying not to cry.”
For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as “suckers.”
Read: Trump calls Americans killed in war “suckers” and “losers”
But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer.
Few spaces in the United States join the sacred and the secular to more moving effect than Arlington National Cemetery, 624 acres set on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River and our nation’s capital. More than 400,000 veterans and their dependents have been laid to rest here, among them nearly 400 Medal of Honor recipients. Rows of matching white tombstones stretch to the end of sight.
A cemetery employee politely attempted to stop the campaign staff from filming in Section 60. Taking campaign photos and videos at gravesites is expressly forbidden under federal law. The Trump entourage, according to a subsequent statement by the U.S. Army, which oversees the cemetery, “abruptly pushed” her aside.
Trump’s campaign soon posted a video on TikTok, overlaid with Trump’s narration: “We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they”—the Biden administration—“took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.”
Trump was unsurprisingly not telling the truth; 11 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in his last year in office, and his administration had itself negotiated the withdrawal. But such fabrications are incidental sins compared with what came next. A top Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, and campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung talked to reporters and savaged the employee who had tried to stop the entourage. Cheung referred to her as “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering a mental-health episode.” LaCivita declared her a “despicable individual” who ought to be fired.
There was, of course, another way to handle this mistake. Governor Spencer Cox of Utah had accompanied Trump to the cemetery, and his campaign emailed out photos of the governor and the former president there. When challenged, Cox did what is foreign to Trump: He apologized. “You are correct,” Cox replied to a person criticizing the event on X, adding, “It did not go through the proper channels and should not have been sent. My campaign will be sending out an apology.”
Read: Trump dishonors fallen soldiers again
This was not a judgment call, or a minor violation of obscure bureaucratic boilerplate. In the regulations governing visitors and behavior at Arlington National Cemetery, many paragraphs lay out what behavior is acceptable and what is not. These read not as suggestions but as commandments. Memorial services are intended to honor the fallen, the regulations note, with a rough eloquence: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”
As the clamor of revulsion swelled this week, LaCivita did not back off. On Wednesday, the Trump adviser posted a photo of Trump at Arlington Cemetery on X and added these words: “The Photo that shook the world and reminded America who the real Commander in Chief is …August 26th 2024 ..Mark the day @KamalaHarris and weak @JoeBiden.”
The Army, which is historically loath to enter politics, issued a rare statement yesterday rebuking the Trump campaign, noting that ceremony participants “had been made aware” of relevant federal laws “prohibiting political activities” and that the employee “acted with professionalism.” The Army said it “considers this matter closed” because the cemetery employee had declined to press charges.
Meanwhile, an unrepentant Trump team kept stoking the controversy. Yesterday, LaCivita posted another photo of Trump at Arlington and added this: “Reposting this hoping to trigger the hacks at @SecArmy”—the Army secretary’s office.
It had the quality of middle-school graffiti, suggesting that Trump viewed the controversy as yet another chance to mock his critics before moving on to the next outrage. For grieving families with loved ones buried in Section 60, moving on is not so easy.
How old, I asked Meredith, was your son at the time of his death? “He was 26,” she replied. “He did not have time to live. I didn’t get to dance at his wedding. I didn’t get to play with grandkids.”
This week, all she could do was call out a crude and self-regarding 78-year-old man for failing, in that most sacred of American places, to comport himself with even the roughest facsimile of dignity.“
Trump Keeps Turning Up the Dial on Vulgarity. Will He Alienate the Voters He Needs?
Trump Keeps Turning Up the Dial on Vulgarity. Will He Alienate the Voters He Needs?
“Donald J. Trump has been reposting racially and sexually charged insults of Kamala Harris, continuing a history of crass attacks. But in Ms. Harris, he may have found a particularly risky target.
Over his decades in the public eye, former President Donald J. Trump has a well-established history of making degrading and racist remarks about women, people of color and pretty much anyone else who crosses his path.
It is a proclivity that dates to his days as a reality television star and that has only expanded in the meme-driven era of social media. In the words of Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, Mr. Trump is “an equal opportunity offender.”
But in Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump has found a particularly complicated and risky target for his trademark brand of transgression, as more Americans are suddenly tuning in to what has become a highly competitive race.
Although there are no clear signs that Mr. Trump has increased the quantity of abuse he levels at his opponents, his decision to repost a string of sexually and racially charged broadsides in recent weeks suggests that he has turned up the dial when it comes to pure vulgarity and crudeness.
That eagerness to offend is likely to receive increased scrutiny as the election enters its final stretch. With both major parties battling for female and moderate swing-state voters, Mr. Trump could potentially alienate an undecided audience uncomfortable with his coarse rhetoric.
Since July 21, when President Biden stepped out of the race and endorsed Ms. Harris, Mr. Trump has directed a seemingly constant fusillade of invective at a challenger who happens to be Black, South Asian and female.
In a little over five weeks, in speeches, social media posts and interviews, Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris a “wack job”; a “communist”; “dumb as a rock”; “real garbage”; “a bum”; and, employing a phrase he applies almost exclusively to women, “nasty.” In early August, he reposted an image depicting Ms. Harris as a dung beetle with her face covered in what appears to be blackface while astride a coconut. And he has made or amplified innuendo-laden references to his opponent’s long-ago relationship with the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, suggesting she traded sexual favors to accelerate her political career.
“She had a very good friend named Willie Brown,” Mr. Trump said at a rally on Aug. 3. “He knows more about her than anybody’s ever known. He could tell you every single thing about her, could tell you stories that you’re not going to want to hear.”
At a convention for Black journalists in Chicago last month, he questioned Ms. Harris’s racial identity, saying that she only recently “became a Black person.” And in addition to a post on Wednesday on his Truth Social platform, which made a crude reference to Ms. Harris and oral sex, Mr. Trump this month reshared a video of a singer in a parody video saying that Ms. Harris has spent her life “down on her knees.”
In a statement, James Singer, a spokesman for Ms. Harris, called Mr. Trump “out of his mind.” He added, “If a family member posted what Donald Trump is sharing today, Americans would rightly be concerned.”
The Trump campaign did not directly respond to questions about his social media posts and reposts or the language he uses when attacking his opponents. Instead, the campaign, asked to address concerns that Mr. Trump ran the risk of alienating crucial voters, said that “women deserve a president who will secure our nation’s borders, remove violent criminals from our neighborhoods and build an economy that helps our families thrive — and that’s exactly what President Trump will do.”
In rallies and other public forums, Mr. Trump continues to use off-color language, deploying the phrase “son of a bitch” at least a dozen times since he announced his re-election campaign in November 2022, and variations of the word “shit” dozens of times in that span. He used the word “fucking” twice in one speech last year in North Carolina.
Ms. Harris, by contrast, has been sparing, using that word once in May and uttering the term “half-assed” during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.
But it is on the internet where much of the crass political discourse takes root. For Mr. Trump, a primary driver is the almost symbiotic relationship he has developed with his base on Truth Social, which he launched in early 2022.
Although he returned to the X platform this month, nearly all of the off-color content Mr. Trump has amplified has been confined to his own site, which has become a kind of echo chamber for MAGA content.
In that politically homogenous, criticism-free context, Mr. Trump’s posts are constantly answered with racist and sexist memes by ardent followers in hopes that the former president will repost them, a badge of honor in MAGA circles. In recent weeks, social media has been awash in digitally manipulated and crude images of Ms. Harris that were created by Mr. Trump’s supporters showing her in sexual situations, often unclothed or in lingerie.
The post that Mr. Trump shared on Wednesday on Truth Social — a screenshot from X that showed an image of Ms. Harris and Hillary Clinton and another user’s reply: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” — was a reply to one of Mr. Trump’s own posts on the site.
An anonymous account with the handle @beware_the_penguin posted the screenshot on Truth Social. In recent weeks, that same account has uploaded and shared dozens of highly sexualized images about Ms. Harris on the platform. At least one other, more PG-rated post from that account, depicting Ms. Harris hiding from reporters under a table, was also reposted by Mr. Trump.
The oral-sex remark came from the account of a pro-Trump podcaster who calls himself Zeek Arkham. The comment alludes to Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, who admitted to having a sexual relationship with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and to Ms. Harris’s relationship with Mr. Brown in the mid-1990s.
The Truth Social post with the screenshot appears to have since been deleted.
On Wednesday, the person running the Zeek Arkham account posted on X that he would “like to apologize because you’re too stupid to vote for someone who actually made the country better,” adding: “I made a dirty joke. You’re voting for one.”
That individual has stated in the past that he is a former New York Police Department officer named Ezequiel Arkham, but no such individual could be located. The New York Times was unable to immediately confirm the identity of either that account or the @beware_the_penguin account on Truth Social.
Mr. Trump reposted — or, in the jargon of Truth Social, retruthed — the sexual content amid a furious spree of activity on his social media platform.
On Wednesday, he boosted at least four posts making reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory, as well as altered images depicting Ms. Harris and other Democratic leaders in orange prison jumpsuits and other posts calling for former President Barack Obama to be tried in a military tribunal.
In the past, Mr. Trump used the platform and Instagram to level attacks against Mr. Biden, reposting, for example, several videos depicting the president as feeble that were made by a group of pro-Trump content creators called the Dilley Meme Team.
In January, he took to Truth Social to call Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who was then challenging him for the Republican presidential nomination, “Nimrada,” a misspelling of her given name, Nimarata, that was interpreted as a racist dog whistle designed to emphasize her identity as the child of South Asian immigrants.
It mirrors a string of posts by Mr. Trump this month that called the vice president “Kamabla,” instead of Kamala.
Susan C. Beachy and Tiff Fehr contributed research.
Karen Yourish is a Times reporter in the Graphics department, combining traditional reporting with data and visual analysis. More about Karen Yourish
Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections.More about Michael Gold“
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