First Kamala Harris “became Black”, then she was “radically left” and Kamabla (whatever that means), and now she is “such a fake,” at least according to Marjorie Taylor Greene. In the GOP’s latest (failed) efforts to land a coherent attack on Harris, Greene has branded the Democratic presidential nominee as a “phony”, citing two recent speeches she gave in Detroit and Pittsburgh.
While Greene did not explicitly outline what exactly was fake about the two clips in her post on X, it’s safe to assume she is referring to Harris’ change in cadence and tone between the two speeches, one of which was given in a city with a higher Black population than the other.
Not only is Greene, a white woman, not at liberty to discuss when and how Harris dips into AAVE — a common phenomenon known as code-switching — but her post also reminds us of her poor oratory skills, since her tone ranges only from whiny to slightly more whiny.
“Kamala Harris is such a fake,” Greene wrote when resharing side-by-side clips of Harris’ speeches. “This phony act is insulting to the American people’s intelligence.”
Naturally, responses to the original post schooled Greene on the commonplace practice of code-switching as “not a gotcha moment” and simply part of “our life”, while others called out the hypocrisy of a Trump loyalist calling someone else fake.
The phoniness of Harris’ opponent has been noted with increased frequency of late, but Trump’s current embroilment in a foreign interference scandal makes his deception — and Greene’s lack of self-awareness — all the more palpable.
Greene’s post came just a day after House Democrats asked Trump to provide proof that he never received funds from the government of Egypt, following a bombshell Washington Post investigation published last month. The article alleges that, just days before he became president in 2016, Trump took a $10 million cash bribe from Egypt to boost his presidential campaign.
That, folks, is textbook foreign election interference, adding to fellow investigations into Trump’s alleged dealings with Russia and Ukraine throughout his presidency. At the time, the Egyptian investigation was put on hold, as Robert Mueller focussed his efforts on the president’s links to Vladimir Putin, but it has now come back to light some eight years after it was initially launched.
While Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung dismissed the Egypt investigation as “fake news”, the mere involvement of the former President in such a controversial probe reminds us of the kind of widespread deception he has been involved in, and the same kind Greene is falsely accusing Harris of.
Changing the tone of one’s speech isn’t nearly as deceptive as allegedly accepting million-dollar bribes, but perhaps we shouldn’t listen to the person who shoots home videos of her enormous rifles.