You Better Believe Kamala Harris Is a “Real” American

I am white and married; a father and
businessman; and a gun owner in my 50s. I love my country, my Constitution, my
flag, my family, my Ford Mustang, and free markets. Anyone at a MAGA rally
would assume that I am a “real” American. 

And I am. 

And you know what? So is Kamala
Harris.   

Who is calling Harris un-American?
Donald Trump himself, of course, has questioned her racial
legitimacy, as he did with
President Barack Obama. And just this week, the National Review’s Rich
Lowry wrote
in The New York Times that Harris is “a phony” who “doesn’t care about
the country” and will therefore lose the “character” debate against
Trump.  

What evidence did the Times demand
before publishing Lowry’s smear that Harris has inferior moral character to an
adjudicated rapist, fraud, and insurrectionist? None, it turns out. Lowry just
asserts it, and the Times just prints it. 

Lowry’s claim, of course, is
absurd. According to his own Cabinet officials and his own family, Trump is a
fabulist and malignant narcissist who cares only about himself. General John
Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, wrote
that Trump “has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our
Constitution, and the rule of law.” By contrast, Harris is a lifelong public
servant who won an election as attorney general by working for her clients, the people
of the state of California, against lawbreakers such as Trump. 

So why are the Times and
Lowry engaged in this deceit?

For their part, Republicans must
make Harris into the devil. As The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols explained,
GOP elites “must now define Harris—and all Democrats—as evil beyond words.
Otherwise, how would they explain the ghastly compromises they’ve made? … When
other conservatives, such as noted retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, are
enthusiastically endorsing Harris, some pretty fancy dancing is
required.”  

As for the Times, their
sense of safety comes from broadcasting “both sides” false equivalence. The Times
has a tradition of finding comfort in this pseudo-savvy: In 1922, the Times
confidently
reported that “credible” and “sophisticated” German political observers
viewed Adolf Hitler as a patriot who would not be so dangerous in
practice.   

If fascists win this election, it
will be due to willful blindness by elites in the media and in business. 

We need to tell the truth. Trump
2024 is tribalism and violence incarnate. He and his running mate are
schoolyard bullies: small men who make themselves feel big by attacking the
woman who looks different. While they campaign to end our constitutional order,
somehow the urban woman is the one whose motives and alliances deserve
suspicion.  

Americans are human and therefore
susceptible to these tactics, which is why we are tied two months out in a
choice between a prosecutor and a convicted felon. In 2021, Rachel Kleinfeld at
the Carnegie Endowment explained
that the “bedrock idea” of the violent right is that “white Christian men in
the United States are under cultural and demographic threat … and Donald Trump
will safeguard their way of life.” In 2019, former Cato scholar Will Wilkinson
(who was later fired for telling the truth about political violence) wrote
that “America’s parties have now split relatively cleanly,” with internal
migration and self-selection creating Trump’s America: “a zero-sum,
ethnocentric mindset receptive to scapegoating populist rhetoric about the
threat of ‘un-American’ immigrants, minorities, and liberal elites.” In 2017, a
Reuters/Ipsos survey found
more than a third of American adults agreed that “white people are currently
under attack in this country.” 

This mindset is grim and
unsettling, but I believe that we will defeat it. America is better than Putin
and Trump think we are. Every patriot who values the soul of America will stand
with Harris against these smears.

That includes me. I am a real
American. I was born here, a child of immigrants. To me, America is a place
where Michelle, a Jew whose grandparents fled the pogroms, could marry Rolf, a
war refugee from Germany whose aunts and uncles were Nazis. My mom and dad met
in grad school at Cal, and I was born in Oakland—simple biological facts also
true of the vice president. If Trump 2024 suggests that Harris is not American,
they literally deny my American identity. 

I take that personally. So will an
electoral majority of Americans, I believe. People like us make up the fabric
and greatness of this country. And we intend to fight for our country.