Prosecutor vs. felon is the theme for 2024. Trump is going to hate it

The Republican Party’s tangled history as a supposed bulwark of “law and order” was already straining under the weight of supporting Donald Trump while ignoring his multiple indictments and felony convictions. But Vice President Kamala Harris taking over as the likely Democratic nominee flips the script. The law and order party … is getting law and ordered. The platitudes Republicans have been spouting for decades aren’t going to cut it in a race where their candidate is constantly playing defense. In the two days that Harris has been at the head of the Democratic ticket, “prosecutor vs. felon” has quickly emerged as a theme of the 2024 campaign. As a former prosecutor and California attorney general, Harris’ primary run in 2020 often focused on her role in holding criminals accountable and, even then, centered on Trump as exactly the kind of perpetrator Harris had faced across a courtroom. As The Washington Post reports, Harris leaned into this on Monday, telling staffers, “I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse. Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse.” Harris also referenced the Trump University scam and her role in busting similar frauds. Harris is going to put Trump on the defensive. And he’s not going to handle it well. During her 2019 campaign for the White House, Harris produced a commercial that could hit the airwaves today. In it, she contrasts herself as someone who prosecuted sexual predators and went after those behind phony colleges, while Trump is the kind of person she held to account. I prosecuted sex predators. Trump is one. I shut down for-profit scam colleges. He ran one. I held big banks accountable. He's owned by them. I'm not just prepared to take on Trump, I'm prepared to beat him. pic.twitter.com/bg4xZ4uLne— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 20, 2019 The issues she brought up in that ad are only amplified in 2024. Not only has Trump lost a civil case in which a judge made it clear that he is an adjudicated rapist, but Trump is actually carrying around 34 felony convictions from his criminal trial in New York. As The New York Times reports, Trump has gone from facing off against an older man who he could deride for being frail and incompetent, to finding himself in a race with a dynamic Black woman who is nearly 20 years younger. That switch has Trump and his team rattled. They really thought that it was too late for Democrats to make a change and that Trump could carry on with the same attacks he’d been using for years.  Now Trump is off balance, facing someone who is everything that makes him uncomfortable all rolled into one: a Black woman prosecutor. The Times worries that this will bring out the worst in Trump. His record of attacking female rivals is already terrible, but add the threat Harris represents as a prosecutor and Trump is likely to unleash something much worse than the "dumb as a rock" insult that he sent the vice president’s way on Monday. Since then, Trump has produced social media posts calling Harris “Lyin’ Kamala” or “Laffin’ Kamala.” Trump already faces a deficit with female voters, and his selection of J.D. Vance as a running mate wasn’t made to woo women back to his cause. On the Democratic side, Harris is expected to broaden an already wide gap with Black voters.  The mythology of so-called law and order is central to the Republican Party’s identity. Trump’s campaign and the recent Republican National Convention were both full of talk about a nonexistent “immigrant crime wave.” But the GOP had zero problem overlooking Trump’s crimes while still holding to the pretense of being the law-and-order party.  Harris won’t allow them to live in that gray zone. Republicans are going to be faced with the intrinsic hypocrisy of their position over and over again. The Times also worries that Trump will attack Harris in a way that only worsens his position with women and Black voters.  The prosecutor-versus-felon approach may appeal to undecided voters who had been sour on both Mr. Trump and President Biden. It may also goad Mr. Trump, who reacts strongly to criticism, into resurrecting the language he has used against other Black female prosecutors, such as Letitia James in New York and Fani Willis in Georgia, both of whom he has called “racist” and attacked in personal terms. He also called James “Peekaboo,” an explicitly racist nickname. It doesn’t seem unlikely that Trump might say something similarly awful about Harris. As The Bulwark reports, Trump’s camp is combing over Harris’ record as a prosecutor with a plan to incorporate it into their attacks on the Democratic candidate. And while his team claims that these attacks will not be race-related, it’s worth noting that Trump adviser Tony Fabrizio was part of the team that developed the infamous Willie Horton ad that George H. W. Bush used to attack Gov. Michael Dukakis during the 1988 campaign. The question is: If Trump tags Harris with a racist