A Michigan college student with a history of challenging Sen. J.D. Vance took to MSNBC this week to argue a crucial flaw in former President Donald Trump's attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.
Marcus Johnson, a political science major at Oakland University, slammed former President Donald Trump and his running mate Vance (R-OH) in a new editorial published by the cable news site.
"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," Johnson wrote. "But we also want to see a campaign that’s based on facts and not obvious lies."
Johnson became a viral sensation earlier this campaign season when he issued a scathing retort to Vance's arguments at the vice presidential debate with Harris' running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN).
The college student disparaged Vance's attack on the "Kamala Harris Administration” as unconvincing to anyone who understood the fundamental operations of the executive branch.
“If anybody took high school civics class they’d know what the vice president can do and what the vice president can’t do,” Johnson said after the debate in a viral comment. “You don’t get to do what you want — you do what the president delegates want you to do.”
Johnson returned to this subject on Monday as Trump and Vance continued to cast blame on Harris for policies put forth by President Joe Biden's administration.
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The student argued Trump and Vance were deliberately misleading the public in a last-ditch effort to recycle campaign attacks they could no longer lob at Biden, who withdrew from the race earlier this year over concerns about his age.
"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."
Johnson argued that Trump and Vance's rhetoric masked an ugly challenge set for the first Black and Asian-American woman to gain a major political party's presidential nomination.
"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."