Live from New York, it’s Kamala Harris’ presidential myth-building.
Deadline reported Wednesday that Maya Rudolph will return to “Saturday Night Live” this fall to reprise her role as Harris. If history is any indication, Rudolph, who has already portrayed Harris on the show 10 times and even won an Emmy for it, will give us the veep as a fun, fierce wine aunt — “Funt” — ready to disembowel her stuffy opponents with a withering takedown.
It is true that both Harris and Trump have much to offer in terms of parody potential. Trump with his bombastic speech, stiff mannerisms and flag hugging. Harris’ word salads and off-putting cackle. Just imagine what “SNL” could do with her interview with Lester Holt — the one where he pointed out that she, the “border czar,” had not yet been to the actual border.
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” she responded with an uncomfortable laugh.
But I predict only one candidate will be made to look like a buffoon, because “SNL” has abandoned its old both-sides approach to political skewering. Gone are the days when the left and the right got the equal walloping they deserved — a precedent that disappeared once Obama came into office and former show writer Jim Downey noted the president had no “flaw or hook that you can caricature.”
Really?
It’s disappointing, but it also falls in line with how Harris’ nascent campaign has been treated. Because it turns out that Trump isn’t just running against Harris — he is running against liberal media and cultural institutions that are building a cocoon around the vice-president, creating a Kamala character the nation can see in the Oval Office.
The media is allowing the Democratic Party to rewrite Harris’ history, from her far-left policy stances to her role heading up the border.
Over the weekend, Politico ran a story about her stance on fracking, which she explicitly said — on camera in 2019 — that she wants to ban.
“Harris campaign pledges she won’t ban fracking after Trump accusation,” Politico reported. After coming under fire, they dropped the “Trump accusations” from the headline but kept it in the story text.
We’ve been told repeatedly by the media that Harris was not in charge of the border, despite a deluge of stories and clips from 2021 to suggest otherwise.
This week’s New York Magazine’s cover proclaims “Kamalot,” with a picture of a laughing Harris on top of a coconut, while Gen Z Tiktok crowns her “brat“ (as we all know by now, that’s a good thing) with memes galore.
Esquire dug into her cookbook collection. The Los Angeles Times actually ran a story headlined, “Kamala Harris is a cook — and she knows her LA restaurants. Will it help her win?”
If it does, God help us. We get what we deserve. We’re all burnt toast.
In the absence of real reporting, those frothy features are ridiculous.
Every publication from the New York Times to the New Yorker has covered her “vibe shift” but not much about her policy shift.
Harris has backed scrapping ICE. She was a Green New Deal sponsor and ranked the “most liberal” member of the Senate by GovTrack in 2019 — though that’s been memory holed. GovTrack changed their mind recently, retracting the label and saying rankings using data from a single year “was not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators.”
Funny how it just became a problem.
Don’t forget, Harris has insisted all along that Biden is spry and healthy.
She has not endured the primary process, and the campaign she ran in 2019 revealed her to be an unserious candidate with many flaws and little substance.
She has had two political rallies, including one where she essentially acted as an MC for a Megan Thee Stallion’s performance.
The Dems are running the same campaign they did in 2020 for Biden: from the basement. And with only three months to keep up this charade, it’s entirely possible she’ll be smuggled into the White House.
So much for saving democracy.
Meanwhile, Trump is saying he wants to renegotiate the terms of their debates, which he agreed upon with Biden, not Harris. But at least he is open to entering hostile territory.
On Wednesday, he attended a National Black Association of Journalists panel which — depending on which social media echo system you inhabit — was either a smashing success or a Hindenburg-level disaster.
But let’s not pretend Harris is running. She’s maneuvering through this new campaign one of those anti-gravity treadmills, moving her legs but not feeling the impact of pavement — or reality.
And Team Trump is allowing it. Instead of exposing this nonsense and focusing on his opponent’s true political identity, Trump is getting into the mud on her racial identity.
The Trump camp needs to focus on substance and less on personal attacks.
Or they can add themselves to the list of people they are running against.
