It was late Monday when Donald Trump first referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Kamabla” on his social media platform. Soon after, the former president repeated the nickname.
A day later, the Republican wrote it again. And then again. And then again. And then again.
At this point, readers might be asking, “What in the world does ‘Kamabla’ actually mean?” That’s certainly a common question this week, and no one seems to know the answer.
That includes Team Trump surrogates. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Gov. Doug Burgum last night, “This is something I’m personally curious about. … Do you know where [‘Kamabla’] came from, and what that nickname means?” The North Dakota Republican replied, “I can’t comment on that.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, was asked the same question. The Ohio Republican chuckled, but he didn’t answer the question.
The mystery, in other words, lingers.
I’ve seen a wide variety of guesses — the idea that this might be some kind of Three Dog Night reference is especially amusing — and it’s certainly possible that Trump didn’t even mean to call her “Kamabla,” but once he did, he decided to lean into the typo.
But there’s also a larger context to all of this. As a New York Times report summarized:
He has long mispronounced Harris’s name, and during his primary race he repeatedly butchered the name of Nikki Haley, another woman of Indian heritage.” He hasn’t explained the new nickname, but the mispronunciation fits with his other efforts to cast her as an outsider.
This is compelling, and coming up with a weird, gibberish-like nickname might very well have something to do with the GOP nominee’s desire to define Harris as The Other. But the whole point of derisive nicknames is to convey an obvious criticism. When Trump called Sen. Marco Rubio “Little Marco,” the phrase was intended to diminish the Floridian’s stature. When he called Sen. Ted Cruz “Lying Ted,” Trump was trying to draw attention to the Texan’s dishonesty. The meaning and purpose of the nicknames were self-evident. No one thought to wonder why in the world Trump was using these lines. The fact that the former president’s own surrogates can’t explain his sudden fixation on “Kamabla” is a timely reminder of a politician who clearly no longer has his fastball.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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