“It’s an Insult to Our Intelligence”: Michigan Student Criticizes Trump and Vance’s Attacks on Kamala Harris
Photo: Manuel Balce Centa/AP
A Michigan college student, Marcus Johnson, has made headlines again, this time taking to MSNBC to challenge former President Donald Trump and Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) over their recent attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris. Johnson, a political science major at Oakland University, has become a vocal figure in political commentary, previously going viral for his critiques of Vance during the 2024 campaign season.
In his latest editorial, Johnson addressed what he described as the misleading and factually incorrect rhetoric being used by the Trump campaign against Harris. “College students such as myself not only want to see a campaign based on the issues — and not on the character attacks, hateful rhetoric, and fearmongering that the Trump campaign keeps using,” he wrote. “But we also want to see a campaign that’s based on facts and not obvious lies.”
Johnson first gained attention earlier in the campaign cycle after delivering a sharp rebuttal to Vance’s remarks during the vice presidential debate between Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), and Vance. The student had called out Vance for misrepresenting Harris’ role as vice president, stating, “If anybody took a high school civics class they’d know what the vice president can do and what the vice president can’t do.”
Returning to the topic on MSNBC, Johnson criticized Trump and Vance for continuing to attack Harris by linking her to policies from President Joe Biden’s administration. Johnson argued that Trump and Vance were deliberately distorting Harris’ role in the administration, using her as a scapegoat for policies implemented by Biden.
“It’s fair to associate her with the successes and failures of the administration,” Johnson wrote. “But it’s an insult to our intelligence to argue, as Trump and Vance are doing, that she could have already done as vice president everything she says she wants to do as president.”
The student further contended that these attacks revealed an unfair double standard being applied to Harris, who is the first Black and Asian-American woman to be nominated for the presidency by a major political party. Johnson believed that such rhetoric was not only unproductive but also designed to undermine her credibility and leadership.
“As soon as Biden announced he was abandoning his campaign and Harris stepped into the role as Democratic nominee, I knew there’d be an unfair double standard placed on her,” Johnson concluded. “But I didn’t expect that she’d be expected to fend off attacks that most teenagers would recognize as bogus.”
Johnson’s criticism of the Trump-Vance campaign highlights a broader dissatisfaction among young voters with the nature of political discourse, focusing more on personal attacks than on substantive issues.
