Most of the coverage of the video below, featuring GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump speaking at a rally in Montana, focused on his dubious assertion that “nobody really knows” the surname of Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s new opponent in the 2024 election.
“You know it’s interesting,” Trump said, “nobody really knows her last name.”
Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has a simple last name — easy to pronounce and, statistically speaking, very “American.”
Indeed, “Harris” was listed recently as the 25th most common surname in the United States, coming in just after “White” and before “Sanchez” — those names together a reflection of the diverse and changing nation both Harris and Trump are competing to lead.
Democrats who have been critical of Trump’s alleged cognitive lapses — the former President’s speaking style is sometimes obtuse, as when he addressed the now famous death by sharks vs. electrocution dilemma — shared the clip (below) and knocked the former President for “word salad.”
Trump: Kamala Harris, you know, it's interesting. Nobody really knows her last name. If you ask people, do you know what her last name is? Nobody has any idea what it is. Harris. It’s like Harris. pic.twitter.com/HhSm95auEC
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 10, 2024
But Trump’s seemingly strange assertion — that nobody knows Harris’s surname — makes more sense to those versed in the nominee’s often indirect speaking style.
In saying people don’t know Harris’s last name, Trump appears to be emphasizing — and disparaging — Harris’s popularity as a “meme” candidate, with the surge in enthusiasm for her candidacy centered around her persona, which is embodied in her first name, Kamala, more than in her less distinctive last name.
[Ironically, perhaps, Trump seems to imply that Harris is cultivating a celebrity-like “cult of personality” — something he is often accused of — and his evidence is Harris being regarded largely on a first-name basis like, say, LeBron (James) or Steph (Curry). Beyonce, Adele, Kanye, and Cher are others.]
But more telling about Trump’s current predicament is the statement at the end of the clip, where he expresses an angry astonishment at how swiftly things have changed for him and his campaign, which had been cruising to success against a weaker opponent, Joe Biden, whose candidacy Trump had been very successful at degrading.
The change in the political landscape and correlating turnabout in his fortunes is so drastic that Trump flashed his anger at the situation in the clip’s end, growling at the new reality and saying bitterly: “How the hell did this happen?”
Trump’s “this” in that sentence is partly what the New York Times described in an article entitled: ‘Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign’.
[NOTE: For Trump, a longtime boxing fan and former fight host, the Democrats’ move looks like Muhammad Ali‘s famous rope-a-dope strategy, letting Trump wear himself out punching Biden and then coming in fresh with Harris after hewasted his hardest punches to weaken a candidate who’s no longer there.]
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