The week Kamala rewrote the rulebook
In the most insane week of the craziest presidential race, Kamala did something remarkable right in front of everyone that very few noticed
Welcome to the weekend edition of The Experiment, your official hopepunk newsletter. If you’d like to support my work, become a paid subscriber or check out the options below. But even if you don’t, this bugga free. Thanks for reading!
With everything that happened this week, you may not have noticed. But Kamala Harris did, and she did something about it that has never happened before in a presidential election.
But, for real y’all, this week was nuts. Remember way back when some moss-brained lost boy tried to assassinate Donald Trump for the second time? That was this week. I know. Also, as former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and current writer at The Atlantic observed, “Beneath the story was the reality that a candidate for president took a day off to golf only 50 days before Election Day.”
And then Trump did something completely normal for a presidential candidate and launched a cryptocurrency business on Monday, the same day Diddy was arrested for sex trafficking, which sounded shocking until the details came out, and then the term “sex trafficking” seemed like a euphemism for what he’d done.
On Tuesday, JD Vance, who spent his Sunday telling CNN’s Dana Bash that he and Trump “created” the messed-up and so-not-true story about illegal Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats, rage-tweeted at Hillary Clinton. “What we’ve been seeing from Trump-Vance is not the behavior of a winning campaign,” observed Frum.
“What we’ve been seeing from Trump-Vance is not the behavior of a winning campaign.”
It was a lot. But looking back, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday crawled so that the rest of the week could wear jockey shorts, duck boots and a funny hat while running blindfolded in traffic with scissors and singing “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but slowly, reciting the lyrics as if calling the names of the damned to rise to take their punishment.
In a coincidence that gives credence to Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity, Wednesday was the 35th anniversary of the release of Billy Joel’s boomer anthem. On Thursday, we updated the lyrics in a succession of events that soon exceeded our ability to mock them.
At first we thought we’d be able to focus on the latest scandal involving North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who apparently went on a pornographic website that includes a message board called “Nude Africa” to commit self-immolation Bingo: calling himself a “black NAZI!”, admitting a preference for transgender porn and to peeping inside women’s locker rooms in college, and sharing that he wanted to own slaves.
“Are you so desperate for community you can’t just click onto a website watch some porn and walk away? You really need to engage?” observed on friend on a text thread.
“I really didn’t think someone could come close to buddying up with Diddy in this news cycle,” said another.
“Are you so desperate for community you can’t just click onto a website watch some porn and walk away? You really need to engage?”
Events soon outpaced even those quick wits. Journalist Olivia Nuzzi, a 31-year-old reporter with a reply guy mien and a penchant for drawing attention with reactionary takes, was placed on leave by New York magazine for having a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she had covered for the magazine. The scandal reached peak-DC when journalist Ryan Lizza not only broke off their engagement but disclosed that he would not be participating in coverage of this story for Politico Playbook.
While all of Washington stared in amazement at l'affaire d'Nuzzi, a sealed court filing leaked that Rep. Matt Gaetz attended a drug-fueled sex party with a 17-year-old girl who must have put her clothes somewhere—and we all kinda nodded exhaustedly and thought collectively, “Yeah, that tracks.” Conservative anti-equity dude Chris Rufo got caught up in the Ashley Madison leak, and video of conservative anti-woke, anti-LGBTQ activist Corey DeAngelis appearing in gay porn surfaced, but those felt like someone was using a stick to poke a lifeless body to make sure it was dead. It was all absolutely too much.
In full disclosure, I didn’t think of the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” thing all on my own. Pretty much everyone online came up with the same joke at the same time.
None of us on the text thread were talking about the article ProPublica published on Monday about two Georgia women who suffered what an official state committee recently called “preventable” deaths because of the state’s six-week abortion ban. I had opened the article and left the tab open to read later. When I did, I scanned the first anecdote about a young mother who died in an Atlanta hospital when she couldn’t get a simple and safe surgery that was illegal under the state law. I closed the tab and chalked the story up to a predictable and entirely unsurprising consequence of banning abortions. So little weight did I assign to this woman’s state-sponsored death that I didn’t even retain her name even though it was in the first damn sentence.
But Kamala Harris did. It was Amber Nicole Thurman, by the way, and by the end of the week she had people chanting it. By all accounts a deliberate and considered politician, Kamala—whose first name is becoming iconic—does not have a lot of frequent flier miles for flying by the seat of her pants. Events on her schedule are planned weeks, not days, in advance. Nevertheless, as reported by The 19th*, a speech in Atlanta popped up on her schedule for Friday even though she had a big rally planned in Wisconsin later that night.
To pull together an event like this for a presidential campaign in days requires a team to function at an elite level. You have to arrange travel, secure a location, get a crowd, build the stage and design the look to illustrate the subject matter. There’s signage, catering, and security. Writing the speech is the easy part. (It’s the edits that kill you.) But all that wasn’t even the hardest part.
There was also Oprah. Kamala had a Zoom with Oprah on Thursday night—yes, that Thursday—and she couldn’t do a Friday speech about Amber Nicole Thurman and ignore her on Thursday with Oprah, especially since abortion was going to come up. So the campaign—which is operating at a level I’ve never seen before, got Amber Nicole Thurman’s mother and sisters to participate in the Oprah Zoom in front of 300,000 viewers.
The most emotional moment came during a portion devoted to reproductive rights, as Winfrey introduced the mother and sisters of Amber Nicole Thurman. ProPublica reported earlier this week that she suffered a grave infection, complications after taking abortion pills. But she died after her doctors in Atlanta delayed treating her fearful of being prosecuted because of the state’s abortion law.
“I want you all to know Amber was not a statistic,” her mother, Shanette, said from the audience, fighting back tears. “She was loved by a family, a strong family, and we would have done whatever to get my baby, our baby, the help she needed.”
Harris said to her and her surviving daughters, “I’m just so sorry. And the courage that you have all shown is extraordinary, because also you just learned about how it is that she died. Amber’s mom shared with me that the word over and over again in her mind is preventable.”
When she spoke the next evening in Atlanta, Kamala didn’t announce any new policy or slogan. Wearing a somber grey suit and black shirt in front of a giant American flag, she said what she has been saying about abortion ever since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. But that is not to say that she did not break new ground. With women seated behind her in grandstands draped to look like jury boxes, Kamala made her case that abortion rights are part of our freedoms as Americans.
“We know that in America, freedom is not to be given, it is not to be bestowed, it is ours by right. It is ours by right, and that includes the fundamental freedom of a woman to be able to make decisions about her own body and not have her government telling her what to do,” she said, noting that more than 20 states now have what she calls “Trump abortion bans.”
Linking abortion to maternal mortality, her voice spitting with anger as she wagged an accusatory finger in the air, she said, “And these hypocrites, wanna start talkin’ about ‘This is in the best interest of the women and children’… Well, where ‘ya been? Where ‘ya been when it comes to taking care of the women and children of America? Where ‘ya been? How dare they?”
Then she brought up the story of “a vibrant, 28-year-old woman” that she’d read on Monday, the same day Trump was shilling cryptocurrency.
“She was excited, she was working hard. She was a medical assistant. She was going to nursing school, raising her 6 year-old son. She was really proud that she had finally worked so hard that she gained the independence…that she was able to get an apartment in a gated community with a pool for her son to play in. She was so proud, and she was headed to nursing school. And her name, and we will speak her name: Amber Nicole Thurman,” said Kamala before repeating, “Amber Nicole Thurman.”
“Amber Nicole Thurman,” chanted the crowd back to her
“Pause on that for a moment. She had her plan.”
Kamala, with sad eyes, nodded slightly and tapped the podium with both hands. “That’s right,” she said. “And she had her future all planned out. And it was her plan. You know, pause on that for a moment,” Kamala said. Her face was brighter now, thinking of a young woman with a plan for her life. Kamala held up her hands, palms out, fingers spread wide.
“She had her plan.”
“What she wanted to do,” said Kamala, coming down hard on the word “she.”
“For her son, for herself, for her future.” Each word marched in a staccato rhythm before Kamala brought her palms together on the word future.
“And so when she discovered she was pregnant, she decided she wanted to have an abortion.”
Everything about the event—the message, the media coverage, the chatter on social media, the images—was flawless. We’ve gotten used to Kamala’s campaign executing flawlessly on a daily basis that we’re becoming harder to impress, but it’s not normal for a candidate to be this good.
But we shouldn’t just let the Atlanta speech go by on the conveyer belt as just another good day for Kamala, because three things about that speech are remarkable, if not unprecedented in American presidential politics.
First, as journalist Jessica Valenti pointed out, Kamala specifically and intentionally “spoke about abortion as a normal part of a person’s life.” Amber Nicole Thurman had plans for herself that did not include having another baby at that time, and that’s perfectly fine.
This may seem like a small thing, but it’s actually quite remarkable. Too often, the abortion stories that politicians feel comfortable sharing are those that were medical necessities or the result of a tragic diagnosis. But here, Harris spoke plainly about the most common kind of abortion—one that’s done simply because a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant anymore. Because it doesn’t fit in with what she wants, or has planned for her life.
Second, Kamala tied abortion to maternal mortality. This isn’t the defensive “safe, legal, and rare” construct Democrats used 20 years ago to shield themselves from conservative attacks, and it’s a long way from 2016-era Hillary Clinton calling fetuses “unborn children,” opposing late-term abortion, and talking about “the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother.” After Dobbs, women are dying, and Kamala doesn’t have time for your triangulation. Women are dying because abortion bans have doctors scared to treat women lest they get sent to prison. To be fair, no presidential nominee has ever linked abortion bans to the preventable deaths of women until now because until 2022 abortion was legal. Still, the “abortion bans kill women” message is new.
And third, Kamala Harris turned a presidential campaign on a dime because a Black woman died. The article appeared on a Monday, she and Oprah talked with her family on a Thursday, and she said her name on a Friday. Amber Nicole Thurman. This is remarkable both as an example of the campaign’s ability as well as the importance that the woman who might become the most powerful person in the world placed on the name of one woman who didn’t need to die.
And then, at 11:42pm1 on Friday night, Donald Trump posted an ALL-CAPS, drunk-uncle screed on Truth Social that promised, if elected, “YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION,” because to him, abortion is either a political abstraction or something you pay your mistress to get.
In a further demonstration of Kamala’s operational advantage over Trump’s golf-a-thon, the ex-President recently announced, after yammering about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats for the last week and a half, “I’m going to go there in the next 2 weeks. I’m going to Springfield…You may never see me again but that’s OK. Got to do what I got to do. 'Whatever happened to Trump?’”
The Republican Mayor of Springfield has asked Trump not to come, so who knows from where on the buffet of madness Trump will select his meal. In the meantime, Trump will have his hands full running against a woman atop a campaign that can, in the span of four days, reorder the politics of abortion by putting respect on the name of a young, Black woman whose death otherwise would have quickly passed notice.
Amber Nicole Thurman. She had her plan.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
Further Reading
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is how I have fun.
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. The New York Times bestseller is out in paperback now!
The image says 8:42pm, but it was seen in the Pacific time zone.
Everlasting gratitude to ProPublica's outstanding journalism.
If it were up to the NYT, we'd still be talking about Biden's age, Hillary's emails, and Trump's latest singsong slur.
That was fantastic. I laughed and I literally cried.