The Typical GOP “Jezebel” Playbook Is a Loser in 2024

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK
JULY 25, 20245:33 PM



Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech in Houston on Thursday. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

It’s been said a lot already—and it’s going to need to be said a lot more through November and potentially for the next four to eight years—but the attacks being leveled against Vice President Kamala Harris this week are just staggeringly sexist, misogynistic, and racist. This, despite the fact that Republican leadership continues to warn prominent party members that such attacks are likely to turn off key constituencies needed to win the election for former President Donald Trump. And yet the sexist and racist attacks on Harris for being a childless cat lady, a weird laugher, and a winsome slut who slept her way to power persist unabated.

Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, called Harris a “DEI vice president,” and former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly tweeted: “She actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics.” Kellyanne Conway called her lazy, saying, “She does not speak well; she does not work hard; she doesn’t inspire anyone.” And Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman went with “intellectually, [she is] just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.” On Monday, Trump called Harris “Dumb as a Rock” on social media, and because Trump can’t stop himself from calling women “crazy,” he launched this brilliant salvo in his remarks in Michigan on Saturday: “I call her Laffin’ Kamala,” he said. “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She’s crazy. She’s nuts.” So. Crazy. Laughter. Lazy. Slutty. DEI hire. Stupid. That seems to be the brief. As Jill Filipovic pointed out earlier in the week, none of this was unexpected, none of it is actually true, none of it is even a little bit new. But of course some of it has historically worked against women candidates.

Yet there is one vital difference between a campaign in which Hillary Clinton was targeted and abused for being a woman in 2016 and the race for the presidency in 2024. The difference is that in 2022, with the Supreme Court’s ending of Roe v. Wade in around half the country, women began to experience punishment and threats for a class of actions that are, for the most part, wholly out of their control. They disliked it immensely. Targeting Harris as someone who is ostensibly a politician who has no control over her career and her success is the same exact play. Query whether it has succeeded with voters in the past couple of years.

Immediately after Roe v. Wade fell two years ago last month, we began to hear stories of women who nearly died because they were unable to get urgently needed medical care while pregnant; young girls unable to terminate a pregnancy that was the result of rape; and women allowed to die because they were given the wrong information about the risks of their pregnancies. We’ve learned about states banning in vitro fertilization and states overregulating mifepristone and jurisdictions attempting to prevent pregnant women from leaving the state for abortion care. We now know that the “conscience” rights of physicians seem to supplant the rights of women bleeding on their tables. And we’ve also met the bullies and sickos who would help husbands prosecute their wives for terminating a pregnancy. Of course, we have remet newly adjudicated sex abuser Donald Trump, and it seems his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, has zealously suggested that abortion is wrong even in cases of rape and incest and floated the idea that parents should have votes proportionate to the number of their children.

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