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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