US Vice President Kamala Harris has been quick off the starting block in the White House race, quickly winning the support of fellow Democrats and raking in more than $80 million on the very first day of her campaign on Sunday (July 21) She promptly recalled her experience as a prosecutor to rap her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, a convicted felon.
“I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain… So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said, recalling her courtroom days, in her very first campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday (July 22).
Her attack on him was on expected lines: the prosecutor berating an offender.
‘Kamala IS brat’
However, she is more than a prosecutor to her admirers. She is hip or, as some say these days, a “brat”.
“Kamala IS brat,” tweeted the British pop singer Charlie XCX, who meant it as high praise, having just released her album, Brat, last month. Her tweet, posted on July 21, has gone viral, with 50 million views and 322,000 likes.
The archetypical brat, Charli explained on TikTok, is “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”.
That could be Kamala Harris, who has drawn flak for the surge in illegal immigrants, but has quickly hit the campaign trail.
Kamala HQ, her campaign headquarters’ X account, clearly loved her being called a brat. It now sports a lime green header photo in the style of the Brat album cover.
Kamala memes
Harris, 59, is suddenly cool, an influencer even without trying, inspiring myriad memes. Past social media posts making fun of her are being turned on their heads.
A Gen X woman building a Gen Z fan base, she has even veteran politicians repeating the memes.
Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois joked about reports that he expected to be “running for something” when Biden dropped out of the race. Pritzker wittily posted: “You think I just fell out of a coconut tree?”
Pritzker, who endorsed Harris, was riffing off Harris memes about coconut trees.
Speaking about her mother at a White House ceremony in 2023, Harris said, “She would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
Some thought her words strange and called her drunk or crazy.
Now people are publishing coconut-themed posts supporting her. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii tweeted his endorsement of Harris on X by posting a photo of himself climbing a coconut tree.
Diversity, abortion rights
Youthful at 59 compared with Donald Trump, the oldest presidential candidate in US history, Kamala has other points in her favour. A woman, Black and South Asian, coming from a multiracial background, she energises women and represents the diversity that is USA today.
She is also strong on abortion rights. Famously, pressing the then Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh on the abortion issue, she asked him, “Can you think of any laws that gives government the power to make decisions about the male body?”
Abortion is a crucial issue in the 2024 election, and pro-choice campaigners have won every contest that focused on reproductive rights since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade in 2022. Harris is expected to make it a central plank of her campaign.
A commentator writing about Harris in the Financial Times notes:
“She has instantly been embraced by younger voters who recognise the bigotries inherent in deriding a Black woman for her joyful individuality, or for using sayings from her multiracial heritage. Literally overnight they injected an explosion of positive energy into what had seemed a hopeless rerun of decades-old battles between moribund old white men. Trump’s supporters may now regret the months they spent insisting that old Boomer men with declining capacity were unfit to be president. Harris is a Gen X Black woman rapidly building a Gen Z fan base for a historic candidacy. The story remains uncertain, but it is suddenly looking like the future, instead of the past.”