There was a clip on Fox Business news yesterday which sort of summed up a problem which has become pervasive on the right side of western politics in the Donald Trump era. One of the pundits, a fellow by the name of Alex Lace, decided to deride the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, and sitting Vice President of the United States, as “the OG Hawk Tuah girl”:
Did I go too far on FOX News calling Kamala Harris the OG Hawk Tuah girl or am I right over the target?
— Alec Lace (@AlecLace) July 23, 2024
pic.twitter.com/injGz2VOr4
For those of you living under a cultural rock, the actual “hawk tuah girl” is a relatively inoffensive twenty-something woman from the American south by the name of Hailey Welch (pictured above) who was accosted on the street in New Orleans while drunk as part of a vox pop being conducted by a youtube channel. Welch was asked to name “one thing that drives a man wild in bed”, and replied that “”You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang“, which was generally taken to reference to spitting on a penis in order to lubricate it for oral sex (the paragraphs one has to write, in this job, honestly).
Anyway, the world being what it is, Welch is now something of a cultural phenomenon and has even recorded her own song.
“The OG Hawk Tuah” girl line about Kamala Harris, if you’re wondering, refers to the fact that in her youth she had a publicly acknowledged relationship with the divorced former Mayor of San Francisco, one Willie Brown. He was much older than her – the relationship took place when she was in her late twenties and he in his early 60s. For years this relationship has been used by those who apparently lack any better arguments against her to imply that Harris slept – or in the words of the Fox Business News analyst “hawk tuahed” her way to the top.
One of the defining features of the Donald Trump era in US politics has been the immense growth of the so-called gender gap, or in plain English the fact that men vote for Trump in droves while women vote against him in overwhelming numbers. If one was to look at the recent Republican convention, one might detect a certain theme around masculinity: You don’t bring out Hulk Hogan to talk about how Trumpamania is going to run wild in order to appeal to 20-something women, after all. Nor do you have UFC head honcho Dana White introducing the Presidential candidate if your target audience is suburban moms. The Trump campaign is, and always has been, a campaign targeted at the bros.
This is borne out in the polls, where the gender gap is a frankly astonishing 26% in the most recent NBC news poll, which has Trump ahead. In that poll, Trump wins men by a margin of 54% to 38% for Harris. Amongst women, the results are almost – but not quite – reversed, with Harris leading by 52% to 42%, albeit just a few days into her campaign.
It seems relatively obvious, therefore, that the Harris campaign would be eager to lean into the gender wars, since they’re her best chance of closing Trump’s still-narrow yet persistent lead. In that, it seems to me, she is likely to be consistently helped by Trump and his supporters. Already, the Harris campaign is circulating a clip of Trump’s VP nominee, JD Vance, describing Harris as a “childless cat lady” and saying that such women “run the country” and are determined to inflict misery on everybody else in order to make up for their own lonely lives. Vance made those comments in a Tucker Carlson interview in 2021, and of course such comments are sort of tailor-made for Carlson’s audience. They might be less well received amongst swing voters, especially the female of that species.
The Trump campaign is set to be bedeviled with such problems over the next few months for the simple reason, I think, that whatever about Trump’s own questionable self-discipline, a great many of his surrogates are simply not incentivised to be team players. Take Mr. Lace above. At the time of writing, his tweet bragging about his own degrading remark about Harris has 3.1million views and 44,000 likes.
44,000 people is not enough, obviously, to win Mr. Trump a single state in the election, but it’s certainly enough to make Mr. Lace a bigger star on the culture-warrior right than he was before he made the comment. The comments are being admiringly shared by some of the biggest Trumpy internet personalities whose common claim to fame is being Trumpy internet personalities – names like Benny Johnson and Ian Miles Cheong.
This is one of the structural problems on the modern right: The way to alienate voters you need to win elections also happens to be the way to win enormous clout and following on social media for people whose whole brand is being “deplorable”. For Trump, distancing himself from such people is entirely unthinkable, and in fact his own instincts are to lean into them.
It goes without saying, obviously, that many of you will see absolutely nothing wrong with all of this and regard it as being very funny. But I’m not sure it speaks well of a political movement that its instincts are to wallow in filth and smears and jokes about crazy cat ladies, especially when there is so much in Kamala Harris’s policy record to criticise. The instincts always seem to be to regard politics as a cross between reality television and pro-wrestling, rather than as an exercise in persuading the persuadable.
It bears remembering that if Harris were to increase her support amongst women by just 4 or 5% over the next few months, this election would be over, and she would be comfortably elected. In such circumstances, a campaign whose supporters and surrogates are eager to revel in the cat lady memes and discuss their opponent in sexually degrading terms might be making a bed that they won’t enjoy sleeping in, come November.