The MAGA faithful didn’t take long to turn their fire on Kamala Harris after Joe Biden finally gave up on his re-election bid.
Their weapon of choice? The tired old suggestion—resting on a long-ago relationship with the future mayor of San Francisco—that Harris slept her way to the top in politics.
First up was right-wing activist and columnist Matt Walsh, who reminded his 2.9 million followers on X that Harris had “got her start in politics by sleeping with Willie Brown.”
He went on: “She became Vice President because Biden needed a non-white female on the ticket. Now she likely becomes the Democratic nominee for president because the guy at the top of the ticket has dementia.
“She’s made a career out of begging for hand outs from powerful men. A thoroughly unimpressive human being.”
Hard on his heels was the right-wing lawyer and OutKick founder Clay Travis, who noted that Democrats had been going on for years about Donald Trump’s “alleged sex” with porn star Stormy Daniels. “So how is Kamala Harris starting her career in politics as the side chick of the married mayor of San Francisco not a hugely important story?” he tweeted.
It is a charge that has been endlessly recycled whenever Harris is mentioned as a future president—and which does not stand up to much scrutiny. A Reuters fact check in 2020 confirmed that the pair did date from 1994 to 1995, the year before Brown became mayor. (Harris went on to become state attorney general before being elected to the U.S. Senate.)
It was not a particularly conventional relationship: Brown is 30 years her senior and was legally a married man, although he’d been separated from his wife for more than a decade by the time they got together.
“Harris and Brown’s relationship was not secret and they made public appearances as a couple,” the Reuters report noted.
The clearly sexist accusations against Harris come as Trumpworld, and Trump himself, try out new attack lines against the Democratic heir apparent after polling suggested that she could prove harder to beat than Biden, despite relatively high unfavorability ratings.
On Saturday, Trump held his first campaign rally since the assassination attempt against him in Pennsylvania and used it to test out his latest derogatory nickname. “I call her Laughing Kamala. Have you watched her laugh? She is crazy. You know, you can tell a lot by a laugh. No, she’s crazy. She’s nuts.”
