Donald Trump’s surprise attack on Kamala Harris’ identitarian gamesmanship is a return to form for a president sometimes likened to a WWE performer.

By suggesting that Harris is “pretending to be black,” Trump has forced Harris and her entire media machine into a meltdown of verbose rationalization. As the saying goes, “when you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Each day that Harris spends justifying herself to the American people is another day that she loses momentum.

In one stroke, Trump pierced Harris’s aura of inevitability and put her on defense. Once again, Trump is showing his political instincts are better than those of the conservative establishment, which insists that Trump focus on policy so as not to give offense, even as Harris and her proxies call him a rapist and a felon. But Trump isn’t a policy nerd. His smashmouth style has always set him apart.

It takes somebody with Trump’s audacity to say the true thing that nobody else dares to say. The forbidden truth of this campaign is that Kamala Harris is an unqualified, race-hustling phony. Her policy record, while damning, is secondary to her serious personal flaws.

Despite having been raised in San Francisco, Harris was caught affecting a Southern accent while speaking to black supporters in Atlanta last week.

During her failed 2019 bid, she shamelessly invoked her childhood in the 1960s to attack Joe Biden as a racist. Many will recall the moment when she giggled during a podcast about rap music and smoking pot. Proclaiming her supposed fondness for weed, she said, “My whole family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

Kamala’s father, Donald J. Harris, chastised his daughter for that remark, saying it invoked a stereotype “in the pursuit of identity politics.” But identity politics is all Kamala Harris knows.

Harris has an incentive for exaggerating her “blackness.” In the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) victimhood hierarchy, blacks are near the top. Harris’s Indian heritage, on the other hand, doesn’t go for much—Indians are among America’s wealthiest ethnic groups, and hardly a victim class. 

There is no reason that her identity should not be an issue, when the left already has made it the central one. There is no question that Harris has been promoted because of her race and sex—Biden explicitly chose her to be vice president to check a box—and the media are absolutely glorifying her on those terms. Harris’s identitarian appeals also have significant implications for democracy. Since when do we elect presidents based on which boxes they check on a job application?

As is typical of Republicans, they expect to win without mentioning the most important thing about this campaign. Trump, fortunately, isn’t a typical Republican. He bullied “Crooked Hillary” into retirement, and he can absolutely defeat Kamala Harris, who is even less accomplished, with the same disparaging disdain for her racial posturing.

If you squint, you’ll notice that beneath the fake outrage of people like Harris and Pete Buttigieg, there is fear. They know that Trump can win by weaponizing resentment of DEI and affirmative action, which, like all forms of aristocratic privilege, are deeply unpopular in an egalitarian nation like America.

There’s a reason they’re objecting to calling Harris a “DEI hire” when they are the ones who came up with DEI in the first place.

They know that voters will respect Trump’s blunt honesty against Harris’s prevarication.

They know that Harris is weak, and with a little scrutiny, she’ll crumble.