With President Biden ‘s announcement on Sunday that he would no longer seek the Democratic party’s nomination in the 2024 election , Republicans found themselves facing the likelihood of running against his preferred replacement: Vice President Kamala Harris . And, while they freaked out a fair amount over the shakeup, right-wing influencers still managed to start attacking their new target with misinformation. The falsehoods, faked images, and innuendos that Donald Trump loyalists are currently trying out against his potential new opponent tend toward the sexually lurid.
His voting bloc is quite interested, for example, in footage and pictures of Harris with TV host Montel Williams at a Los Angeles charity event in 2001, when the two briefly dated. (Williams had just divorced his second wife, while Harris would marry her husband, Doug Emhoff, in 2014.) It’s a random bit of trivia that surfaces now and then, usually to Williams’ annoyance.
But MAGA propagandists have used the clips to suggest that Harris is only where she is now because of her relationships with famous and powerful men — and, bafflingly, that she has connections to Sean “Diddy” Combs . The hip-hop mogul has been sued by multiple women for sexual assault and is under investigation for sex trafficking (he’s repeatedly denied the allegations), yet there is no proof of any association between him and Harris (or Williams, for that matter). One user on X (formerly Twitter) with nearly half a million.