A beginner’s guide to two dizzying weeks in US politics, compiled by a childless cat lady from California:
Brat – If you’re not a member of Generation Z (in your teens or 20s) you may not be familiar with the British pop star Charli XCX or the saucy chartreuse green album, titled Brat, which she released in June. Hours after Joe Biden pulled out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris, Charli wrote on X, “kamala is brat”. A digital cell of Harris’s campaign, whose employees are under age 25, instantly restyled the BidenHQ Instagram account as KamalaHQ, appropriating the graphics and chartreuse colour of Charli’s album.
Childless cat ladies – Vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s video and paper trail has become a liability. In a 2021 interview Vance said that prominent Democrats, including Harris were “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”. Vance wants childless Americans to pay higher taxes and suggests that parents should be given extra voting rights. Minnesota governor Tim Walz warned that Vance should “go on the internet and see how it turns out for people who attack cats”. Jennifer Aniston and a host of Taylor Swift fans retaliated online.
Coconuts – Republicans dug up a 2023 video of Harris quoting her Indian mother who said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Harris laughs, then reframes the quote in California-speak: “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Republicans used the video to mock “crazy Kamala”, but the Veep’s supporters embraced coconut tree emojis and labelled themselves “coconut-pilled”.
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DEI hire – At least three Trump operatives have called Harris a “DEI hire” meaning a person who is hired to increase diversity, equity and inclusion. Susan Rice, who was Obama’s ambassador to the UN and national security adviser, says the term is “profoundly offensive and insulting… It’s basically saying to the vast majority of Americans: ‘If you are not a white Christian male then any success you have you got without merit because of some unfair preference’.”
Gaza – Joe Biden’s support for Israel as it killed close to 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza diminished his chances of defeating Trump. Harris’s tone is different. After meeting prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Washington on July 25th, she said: “The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time – we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies, we cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” Trump said Harris “hates Jews”.
Hannibal Lecter – Trump often mentions the fictional psychopathic cannibal as an example of the sort of immigrants the Biden administration allows to enter the US. Here’s Trump on July 24th: “The late great Hannibal Lecter, OK? They say ‘why would he mention Hannibal Lecter? He must be cognitively in trouble.’ No no no, these are real stories. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lamb [sic]. He’s a lovely man. He’d love to have you for dinner.”
Sharks – Trump has been talking since last October about the danger of a battery powered boat sinking while a shark lurks nearby. He says he’d choose electrocution over the shark. Could this be a rant against electric vehicles?
Supreme Court reform – Joe Biden this week proposed reforms of the US’s highest judicial body which Trump has stocked with far-right appointees. Biden wants 18-year terms for justices, a code of ethics and a constitutional amendment reversing the Trump court’s establishment of criminal immunity for former presidents.
Weird – Harris has taken up Minnesota governor Walz’s description of the Trump/Vance duo as weird. Trump calls Harris evil, unhinged and sick. He pulled out of a previously scheduled debate in September. “If you got something to say,” Harris challenged him this week, “say it to my face.”
Women – Nearly one-fifth of the world’s countries have been governed by women but not the US. At a time when 29 heads of state or government across the world are women many Americans fear racism and sexism will prove insurmountable obstacles to Harris defeating Trump.
Vance is close to the New Right think tank the Claremont Institute. Prof Scott Yenor, a fellow at Claremont, says career-oriented women are “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be”. Another Claremont fellow, podcast host Jack Murphy, has said that “feminists need rape”. Digital newspaper company Politico describes Vance’s outburst against “miserable cat ladies” as a tamer version of Christian right author Stephen Wolfe’s belief that in an ideal state women would not be allowed to vote.
In Trump’s vocabulary women are “hot”, “ugly”, “fat” or “nasty”. When attorney Roberta Kaplan asked Trump if he had raped E. Jean Carroll, he replied, “She’s not my type.” Addressing Kaplan, the former president added: “You wouldn’t be a choice of mine either, to be honest with you…I would not, under any circumstances, have any interest in you.”