It’s not surprising that Donald Trump is planning a vile, racist attack on Kamala Harris. He is neither original nor particularly imaginative and this is just how he rolls. But there is one angle of this nasty plan that takes a page out of history — the presidential election of 1988, to be exact.

When President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday and endorsed Harris, this briefly unmoored the Trump campaign, which struggled to find its feet. Even before Biden announced his decision, Trump had trotted out a couple of clumsy nicknames — “Laughing Kamala,” and “‘Dumb as a Rock’ Kamala,” but these inept (even by Trump standards) nicknames failed to gain traction.

But Republicans are knuckling down now and are planning to attack Harris’s record as a district attorney in San Francisco. Don’t worry, though. Kamala’s already caught wind of this and she’s weaponizing herself against convicted felon Trump, The New Republic tells us. She’s not “dumb as a rock,” as Trump likes to think.

According to one Trump adviser, one such plan is to use a line of attack that brought down former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who, in 1988, ran against then-Republican candidate George H.W. Bush, who inexplicably (and wrongly) blamed Dukakis. The adviser told The Bulwark that Harris’s cases include “several Willie Hortons,” referring to the racist attack ad that was launched against Dukakis at the time.

It seems this has become a popular tactic for Republicans. As noted by the late Walter Shapiro in a column for The New Republic in 2022, “It has become a Republican cliché: When the polls look ominous, the party often conjures the image of a menacing Black man.”

The notorious Horton ads fanned the flames of race-based politics by relying on racist tropes portraying Black men as criminals, thus fearmongering that a Democratic presidency would be a scary, dangerous one. Trump is already an expert at this game since he lies about immigrant crime rates. He and other Republicans will almost certainly use this attack on Harris.

Some Republicans are already using this claptrap, especially Senator Tom Cotton, who on CNN Tuesday, called Harris a “failed San Francisco liberal that’s wrong for America.” He claimed there were many cases where she was “weak on crime” and let “thousands” of criminals walk free. He referred specifically to one such case that will since Republicans lack imagination, likely become a frequently used talking point.

In 2004 Harris declined to seek the death penalty for the man who killed police officer Isaac Espinoza, even though several California Democrats had pressured her to do this.

But this is ironic, because, as CNN’s John Berman reminded Cotton, when Trump ran for president in 2020, his campaign attacked Harris for the exact opposite: being too tough on criminals. We all heard then-Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson claiming that Harris “fought to keep inmates locked up in overcrowded prisons so they could be used for cheap labor, she championed laws that put parents in jail for truancy and prosecuted the mentally ill.”

I have no idea how true any of this is since as noted by Snopes, Pierson is not the most credible person.

What I do know is this: Harris is a strong woman who can’t easily be bullied into a corner. Especially when it comes to a woman’s right to rule over her own body. Abortion will become front and center if she’s elected. And she’s definitely gaining on Trump, as Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, writing for Ms. Magazine tells us.

“…the instantaneous outpouring of energy for Harris as the presidential nominee is not only massive but measurable. Her campaign broke the coffers in a mere 24 hours, raising over $81 million in small donations, a new record. Sixty-two percent of those came from first-time givers. More than 44,000 Black women held a same-day Zoom to get down to mobilization plans, followed by 53,000 Black men committing to the same the next day.”

So if Trump wants to beat Harris, his campaign needs to come up with something other than crappy-looking gold sneakers to fatten his own coffers. Because Kamala is coming after him.