Kamala Harris, born in October of 1964 in Oakland, California,
meets all the constitutional criteria to serve as president — and therefore as vice president — of the United States.
Yet on August 12, Newsweek published an
op-ed by John Eastman, a professor at the Chapman School of Law and a fellow at the Claremont Institute, arguing that she does not. The publication’s
editors are at pains to argue that Eastman’s argument had nothing to do with the “racist conspiracy theory” of birtherism. But Donald Trump, who parlayed his considerable fame into political clout specifically by avowing such racist theories, appeared to embrace Eastman’s theories the next day at a West Wing event, saying he’d heard from a highly qualified lawyer that Harris is ineligible.
There are several things in the mix here: racist dog whistles, constitutional theory, and a somewhat serious conservative push to overturn the legal basis of American citizenship.
But most of all, it’s a story of
Trump’s love of bullshyt — a form of non-factual discourse in which he’s barely even trying to trick people.
He’s just saying things — willfully indifferent to their truth or falsity — and in doing so creating new shibboleths for his movement and his followers. Just as it’s now an article of faith in Trumpist circles that Joe Biden is senile, that Hillary Clinton committed some kind of grave crime related to email server management, that
something called “Obamagate” happened, and that vote-by-mail is different from absentee ballots, we will likely soon be hearing endless shifting stories about Harris’s supposed ineligibility. None of it is true, and the details barely matter, but such is the phantasmagoria we inhabit in Donald Trump’s America, even as hundreds die daily of a viral disease without a cure.
in nature,,if you think about it.
