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PODCAST

Fox News’s Awful New Kamala Harris Smears Hit Nuclear Levels of Idiocy

As right-wing media scramble for an effective attack on the vice president, a reporter who has closely examined Harris’s career explains why her political identity is so hard to pin down.

Kamala Harris laughing
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington, D.C., on July 19

Ever since President Biden suspended his campaign, Fox News and right-wing media have been scrambling madly for an effective attack on Vice President Kamala Harris. They’ve ridiculed her laugh. They’ve mocked her as a product of DEI. They’ve attacked her as too soft on crime and too tough on crime.  All of which gets at a larger story: Kamala Harris is very hard for the right to pigeonhole. We talked to Elaina Plott Calabro, a staff writer for The Atlantic who reports trenchantly on Harris’s political career, about why the right’s contortions could prove a major dynamic in the presidential race, and how Harris’s own struggle to find her political identity could now loom large. Listen to this episode here.