Kamala Harris is as cringey and vapid as ever

Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ favourite wine aunt, has made a surprise return to the spotlight. In a speech to an audience of Democrats last week, in her hometown of San Francisco, she attacked President Trump on what was his 100th day in office.

Judging by the speech, it seems Harris has learned nothing from her epic defeat to Trump in last year’s presidential race. She seemed as incapable as ever of offering a cogent, unifying message for a party that is now in disarray.

Instead, she went heavy on meaningless platitudes – ‘the one power that must not fail’, she said, before a long dramatic pause, ‘is the voice of the people’. And she continued to indulge progressives’ fantasy that they are the good guys, the people who fight for truth, justice and the American way. In truth, we all know they are the lunatics who support things like tax-payer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal migrants.

None of this should be a surprise. Harris perfectly embodies the Democratic Party’s derangement, and its abandonment of the American working and lower-middle classes. She is a deeply unserious figure incapable of offering much beyond the ‘progressive’ pieties of the day.

The highlight of her otherwise banal speech was a bizarre ramble about how elephants – ironically, the symbol of the Republican Party – stick together and protect their own. Other than that, Harris dutifully spewed predictable right-on criticisms of the first 100 days of the Trump administration. She slammed the tariff policy, the deportations of illegal migrants and gang members, and the showdowns with Ivy League universities.

If you live in a blue bubble, which her audience almost certainly does, you would no doubt agree with her dystopian portrait of life under Trump. But if you live in the reality-based community, which many Americans clearly do, you would be far more understanding of what the new president is trying to do.

People want Trump to address the global-trade imbalances that have harmed blue-collar Americans for decades. They want him to tackle the flow of unvetted migrants into the US, which has benefitted organised crime and brought down wages for working-class citizens. And they appreciate that someone is finally taking on the Ivy League universities, a ‘progressive’ monoculture that has actively undermined core American values like free speech for years. They might not agree with how he’s going about it, but they do at least understand what he’s trying to achieve.

Yet the likes of Harris seem incapable of such understanding. And as a result, they can’t grasp what Trump is doing except as some sort of villainy.

Everyone in politics knows that Harris is about as popular as a fart on a crowded bus. Not even her home state of California, where she’s weighing up a run for governor, is that fussed about her. Politico – hardly a MAGA mouthpiece – reported in April that ‘political influencers in California… greeted Kamala Harris’s potential bid for governor with a shrug’. In March, a CNN survey asked over a thousand left-leaning voters which Democratic leader ‘best reflects the core values of the Democratic Party’. Harris scored a shocking nine per cent.

The Democrats’ hysterical messaging is doing serious damage to the minds of their base. Far too many Democrat voters now possess a visceral hatred for Trump and members of his cabinet. I was in California in April, and while perusing a ladies’ clothing shop in a lovely, tree-lined neighbourhood, an otherwise pleasant woman began announcing loudly how she wished ‘someone would shoot Trump’.

Right now, it’s hard to see who can bring the Democrats and their supporters back down to planet Earth. One thing’s for sure. That person will not be Kamala Harris.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here