Our Laughing Hero

Yes, Kamala Will Survive the MAGA Rage Just Fine

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“Hillary sucks but not like Monica!” “A witch on a broomstick.” Elected women at all levels reduced to objects of porn and scorn. C-word, B-word… 

That’s just a small sample of the shocking images, sounds, and memes hurled at women from the first Trump nominating convention in Cleveland in 2016 - the first full-throated battle cry of the misogyny he unleashed and that MAGA now celebrates.

After eight years of MAGA, women have come to expect AI deepfake porn and all manner of repulsive innuendo to be the first barrier to participation in American politics. The humiliation, sexualization, and abuse heaped on women in American public life has lost its power to shock.

So no one was surprised that within hours of Harris replacing Biden, two “patriots” posted themselves on social media holding American flags and a banner emblazoned with the words “Kamala is Blowing Guys Behind this Banner. $5 First Come First Serve.” 

We may feel horror – but I doubt anyone was all that shocked. And in this cultural moment, we aren’t even surprised that women participate in the pile-on. Megyn Kelly, one of predator Roger Ailes’ “twirler” blondes, a woman with influence, access, and money, almost immediately used her elevated position on X to attack Harris for - of all things - non-marital sex. “She actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics and most women (and men) may learn that and see it for what it is: evidence of an unqualified political aspirant getting ahead based on smthg other than merit. It’s relevant, and fair game.”

Wow, Megyn.

Desperate times, desperate MAGAs. 

Much of the rest of the world can’t understand us. When I was in Norway lecturing on U.S. politics before the 2020 election, audiences would sometimes raise their hands and ask, perplexed: “But what’s wrong with Elizabeth Warren?” I could only smile sadly and shake my head. 

Oh you little lambs, I would think.

How could one explain to decent rational people who had somehow largely transcended gender as a political barrier that many American men of both left and right persuasions are so deeply frightened of women in power that they will unapologetically use inchoate, subjective responses like “I hate her voice” to explain their political choices. 

But really, how is it that we, nation of Susan B. Anthony and Gloria Steinem and Brittney Griner and Shirley Chisholm and Megan Rapinoe – and Judith Butler for god’s sake – are so late to the party? Italy, one of the birthplaces of the word machismo, has a woman leader. More than a half dozen Latin American nations where machismo is also alive and well, such as Nicaragua, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Panama, already elected female leaders in recent decades. 

America has sadly been a Western role model for the nations that reflexively cannot elevate women. We stand with countries in deep sexist backlash mode, including authoritarian and authoritarian-adjacent states like Hungary and Russia, and theocracies like Afghanistan and the Gulf States and Iran, all places where keeping the boot on women’s necks is critical to the larger enterprise of maintaining a claque of insecure men in charge. 

Russian propagandist Sergei Mardan joined other Russian commentators insulting Harris as soon as she replaced Biden as the challenger to their chum, Donald – that manly hero who brought Miss Universe to Moscow. “The deep state really is planning to elect a baba for president,” he said, using a derogatory Russian term for an older woman. 

How do you say “jackass” in Russian? 

But the real hate is inside America. The underground river of misogyny runs from Silicon Valley to Wall Street and into the great institutions and academies. There has been absolute panic and loathing around women rising. We’ve been living with the open, fully locked and loaded backlash since the summer of 2016. Almost as bad as the MAGA hate is the toned-down resentment, shared by men on the left and the right and of all races. “I don’t like her voice,” “She’s too shrill,” “She’s not authentic…”

It’s been so unfair, so ugly, and so dispiriting. 

But now a candidate has entered the field who appears to have the temperament to resist despair and resentment. One of the essential qualities of any successful politician, male or female, is the ability to let abuse roll off your back without going into an angry, defensive crouch. Never let them see you mad. Our last female presidential candidate, unfortunately, did not have that. Once the right put Hillary Clinton in their sights, the pile-on was relentless and she wasn’t able to laugh it off. Who among us could?

But Harris laughs. And laughs so well that it drives some men crazy. 

Hungarian right-wing extremist export to America Seb Gorka, too brutish even for the Trump White House, which he left after shoving a journalist in Washington, complained that Harris “cackles like an insane woman.” 

Sean Hannity devoted a segment on Fox to her laughter. A laughing woman leader, apparently, will invite our enemies to invade our country!

 “I don’t care if it’s China, Iran, North Korea, Russia – they never feared Joe Biden. They did fear Donald Trump. They won’t fear Kamala Harris,” Hannity told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “They’ll laugh at Kamala Harris because that’s what she does half the time anyway. She giggles away, you know, her time. I don’t think they’ll take her seriously because I don’t think she’s a serious person.”

Remember that Sean Hannity’s idea of a “serious” candidate is a buffoon who rambles about sinking boats and electrocuted sharks while arguing against subsidies for electric vehicles. 

As Margaret Atwood has pointed out: Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. 

Harris is fully capable of laughing at men, and at one man in particular whose fear of laughing women is obviously bone deep. She can fight – but without the edge or rancor that misogynists find so scary in women. 

Take a look at one of the Harris clips making the rounds, from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Boohoo Brett Kavanaugh. 

In what the Washington Post called “a cool and deliciously patient voice,” then-Sen. Harris asked Kavanaugh about Roe v. Wade, a subject about which he, like the rest of the lying Leonard Leo nominees who gave women Dobbs, wanted to avoid: 

“Can you think of any laws,” she asked the nominee, “that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

“Um,” Kavanaugh replied, “I am happy to answer a more specific question, but — ”

“Male versus female,” Harris offered, smiling, and when Kavanaugh still expressed confusion, she repeated her 19-word question: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

Kavanaugh responded, “I am not thinking of any right now.”

Kavanaugh of course, went on to cry - sob uncontrollably - defending himself against allegations of sexual abuse. His display of extreme emotionality - traditionally considered a female failing - would have been disqualifying in any woman candidate, for sure. Yet after proving he lacked all judicial temperament, off he went to get his black robe, a lifetime sinecure, and the right to decide how and whether tens of millions of American women receive health care.

These are not serious people. They carry serious hate and some of them have serious power and some of them carry weapons but they are not serious. They lack wisdom and self-knowledge and humanity. We can see that in their words, their rages, their hypocrisy, and their lack of shame. 

The contrast between Kamala Harris and the women of Trumpworld is stark and bears noting. Every picture of women at Mar-a-Lago tells the same story, communicated without words: the saga of women so abject to male power and so sure that the only and best way to happiness and success is to attach themselves to and mollify a quivering insecure toxic masculine troglodyte with money and worldly influence. Made up into Trumpy beauty pageant standards, teetering on the obligatory stiletto… they must have to pretend to like it. Put another way: Have you ever seen Melania laugh?

Tell me again about authenticity. 

Of course MAGA is aiming their disgusting firehose of misogyny – she screwed her way to the top, she doesn’t have children, ugh, her laugh, her voice – straight at Kamala Harris. They want to drown her in it because they need to give their thin-skinned bully time to get back up and help them with the memes and nicknames. 

MAGA expects him to go for the jugular of this worst nightmare, a female challenger and person of color who laughs at him. They can’t have him sitting back in the rocking chair while Kamala Harris turns the campaign into a joyous rave. Instead of coming up with a snappy insult, he appears to be waffling on whether to debate her.

She who laughs first this summer will laugh last this fall. When Harris sails out of the MAGA sewer unscathed, she will bathe in Trumpy tears.