“The View” co-host Ana Navarro moved the Kamala Harris campaign into the gutter when she posted a nude photo of Trump's wife Melania on her Instagram account.
She explained that it was in response to the "misogynistic" and "racist" attacks on Harris by Republicans. Even if the GOP had been calling Harris every racist name in the book, she's a candidate. Melania is not.
“Some Republicans are out there on TV and social media making vile sexual remarks about Kamala Harris and wanting to make her dating history an issue,” Navarro captioned the naked photo of Melania Trump. The photo was part of a GQ spread first published in January 2000 and republished after Trump became president in 2016.
“This country deserves a debate on real issues, affecting us all. But you want to make this an issue? Bring it on,” Navarro added.
Make exactly what an issue?
“She does not speak well, she does not work hard,” said former Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway on Fox News on Sunday and quoted in The New Republic. “She should not be the standard-bearer for the party.”
It's not a racist smear if it's true.
“What the hell have you done other than to collect a government check for the past 20 years?” Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance demanded at a campaign rally on Monday.
That's "racist" or "misogynistic"?
Republicans are getting the Obama treatment. Anything negative said about Harris will immediately be branded "racist" and dismissed. That line of attack was so overused during the Obama years that the word "racist" lost its power to damage and destroy, something I didn't think was possible as a child of the '60s and '70s.
For a politician to be called a racist in 1970s America was to end one's career. But what power does the word hold when it's applied to anyone and everyone who says an untoward word against a black politician?
Some evangelical opponents of Harris have referred to her as a "Jezebel." Biblically speaking, Jezebel was a woman who led the Israelites astray and was consumed by dogs for her sins. Colloquially, Jezebel is "an immoral woman who deceives people in order to get what she wants," according to the Cambridge Dictionary.
Apparently, if you look very closely and transpose a word or two, here and there, you can make calling Harris a "Jezebel" “an incitement to violence.”
“We’re all tired of being called racists,” a 74-year-old white man named Richard Haines told Atlantic writer Elaina Plott Calabro in 2019. “You open your mouth, you’re a racist. My daughter is a liberal, and she’s [using the word] all the time. We don’t talk politics; we can’t — all the time she always accuses me of hate.”
Navarro went to the next level of gutter politics, associating Trump with a sex trafficker.
The Instagram post also included a photo of the Trumps at a party with sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
“I’ve never seen naked pics of Kamala Harris or her spouse. Kamala never partied with sexual predators,” Navarro continued. “You wanna go low? I’m not leaving one thing unanswered this time. Not a one. I’ll happily go 20,000 leagues under the sea.”
Harris’ attackers have focused on her past relationships with talk show host Montell Williams and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, both of whom are Black, before marrying Doug Emhoff, who is white, in 2014.
Does anyone care to replay the attacks on Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene? Women in politics have been a target from the beginning of the republic. It's offensive but hardly confined to one party.
Pretending otherwise is what Navarro is doing.
