Today's New York Times ran a story by Jess Bidgood. If you click on that link to her name, you will find that it is Bidgood's objective, as a reporter, to "cover important political moments with clarity and perspective, and zoom in to tell vivid stories about American political culture."
Bidgood's article in today's edition of The Times featured a claim that "Trump Trusts Instincts Over Strategy."
And... what are Trump's "instincts," where his contest against Kamala Harris is at issue?
Trump's instincts are based in misogyny. DEEP misogyny. Misogyny to the max. Misogyny coupled, as we are not surprised to be reminded, with a similarly deep and profound racism.
We have, of course, long known this about Trump - about his misogyny in particular. In 2016, for instance, we learned about Trump's comment that, "when you're a star... you can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy."
In today's article, Bidgood doesn't mention that particularly "vivid story about American political culture." Read what she did say yourself. Here is pretty much the entirety of what Bidgood said in her report in The Times. See if you don't agree with me that her story illuminates the deep-seated misogyny of Donald J. Trump, brewed up in a toxic combination with his profound racism (emphasis added):
It’s Instincts Over Strategy for Trump
When Donald Trump held a news conference last week, ostensibly to hit Vice President Kamala Harris for not yet having held one of her own, he said something revealing about how her sudden climb up the Democratic ticket had shaped his own campaign for the presidency — or not.
“I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all,” the former president said. That seems true.
For decades, Trump has operated with an instinctive political style that he honed in the tribal and combative world of New York City politics...
Those instincts are being freshly tested as he struggles to settle on a message against Harris.
Instead of resetting his campaign after President Biden dropped out of the race, Trump has spent the past three and a half weeks grumbling about Harris’s crowd sizes, grousing about Biden’s exit and lobbing a barrage of politically risky insults about Harris’s race, first name and intelligence.
“It’s combative, it tends to be highly personal, and it tends to be highly negative,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political strategist in New York who has observed Trump for decades.
But with polls showing him slipping behind Harris in key battleground states, some Republicans want him to swap instincts for strategy.
“Quit whining about her,” former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, an erstwhile Trump opponent who endorsed him this year, said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday night, adding, “I want this campaign to win.”
A road map, rejected
Two days after Biden dropped out of the race and Harris announced she was running for president, David McCormick, a Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, posted an ad on X excoriating her for positions she took while running in the 2020 presidential race. Some in his party saw it as a clear road map for campaigning against a California Democrat they believed would be vulnerable on issues like inflation and immigration.
Trump, apparently, had other ideas.
From his first posts on Truth Social through the campaign rallies and interviews he has held since that day, he has made a point of both attacking Biden and complaining that his withdrawal from the race is deeply unfair. He has insulted Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of a state, Georgia, he dearly needs to win. And he has often fired conflicting attacks Harris’s way.
Is she a legal mastermind behind the criminal cases against him, drawing on her background as a prosecutor, as he claimed on July 24? Or, was she “really bad” at that job, as he also claimed?
Is she a “lunatic,” more liberal than Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as Trump claimed at a rally in St. Cloud on July 28? Or is she a “phony,” as he described her during a two-hour livestream on X on Monday?
On July 31, he took aim at Harris’s race, bizarrely suggesting that the Black daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica “made a turn and she became a Black person” before bragging about the interview on his social media site. The timeworn tactic of “othering” continued as he repeatedly mispronounced and misspelled her name, saying onstage last week that he “couldn’t care less” how it’s pronounced. He has repeatedly insulted her intelligence and, at a campaign rally today in Asheville, N.C., said Democrats had elevated her “because they decided to get politically correct.”
It’s an approach consistent with the campaigns Trump saw in New York in the days of Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, Sheinkopf said, that played on racial stereotypes and sometimes pit different ethnic or racial groups against one another.
But the approach risks turning off voters of color and women — as well as distracts from the efforts his campaign staff is making through its advertisements to frame the campaign around issues.
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