Donald Trump calls Kamala Harris a ‘liar,’ ‘nasty’ and ‘mean’

1.5k

View
comments

Joe Biden named California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate on Tuesday, making history by selecting the first black woman to compete on a major party’s presidential ticket and acknowledging the vital role black voters will play in his bid to defeat President Donald Trump.

In choosing Harris, Biden is embracing a former rival from the Democratic primary who is familiar with the unique rigor of a national campaign. The 55-year-old first-term senator, who is also of South Asian descent, is one of the party’s most prominent figures. She quickly became a top contender for the No. 2 spot after her own White House campaign ended.

She will appear with Biden for the first time as his running mate at an event Wednesday near his home in Wilmington, Delaware.

In announcing the pick, Biden called Harris a ‘fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants.’ She said Biden would ‘unify the American people’ and ‘build an America that lives up to our ideals.’

Harris joins Biden at a moment of unprecedented national crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 160,000 people in the U.S., far more than the toll experienced in other countries. Business closures and disruptions resulting from the pandemic have caused severe economic problems. Unrest, meanwhile, has emerged across the country as Americans protest racism and police brutality. 

Trump’s uneven handling of the crises has given Biden an opening, and he enters the fall campaign in strong position against the president. In adding Harris to the ticket, he can point to her relatively centrist record on issues such as health care and her background in law enforcement in the nation’s largest state. 

President Trump has made his thoughts known about Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s pick for vice president, Kamala Harris saying that Senator labelled Biden as ‘essentially racist’. 

But he also revealed that Harris would have been his ‘number one pick’, if he were to be given a choice over who he and vice president Pence would most like to face off against this coming November.   

‘She did very very poorly in primaries, she ended up right around two percent,’ Trump noted.  

‘She was very disrespectful to Joe Biden. It’s hard to pick someone that was that disrespectful,’ Trump continued referring to a moment in the Democratic debates last summer.  

The president told reporters that Harris was ‘about the most liberal person in the U.S. Senate.’

‘I would have thought that Biden would have tried to stay away from that a little bit,’ he said. 

Trump’s first on-camera remarks came on Tuesday afternoon during a White House press briefing in which he  revealed his surprise was mainly due to Harris’ ‘very poor’ primary performance. 

‘When she said things during the debates, during the Democratic primary debates that were horrible about Sleepy Joe, I would think you would not have picked her,’ Trump said, slipping in an insult against his chief rival. 

Later on Tuesday evening, during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday evening, the president continued to express his surprise at Biden’s choice.   

‘She was one of the people that was projected to have a chance at winning. All she did as people got to know her, she went down. She finished at 2%, probably less than that and she fled. Remember how quickly. She said horrible things about Biden… She made terrible statements. She essentially called him a racist. And other things that were very bad.

‘She was my number one draft pick. She was the one I thought would be the best for us.’

At his Tuesday news conference Trump launched a series of angry personal attacks and accusations at the nation’s first black female vice presidential nominee, calling Sen. Harris ‘nasty’ and ‘mean’ .

Trump leveled the insults from the White House podium, taking on a vice presidential choice Democrats embraced in part because of her experience on the television stage after vowing to ‘prosecute’ Trump. 

‘She was very nasty, – one of the reasons that surprised me, she was probably nastier than even Pocahontas to Joe Biden,’ Trump said, using the slur he often attaches to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, another contender. 

Trump also brought up her blasts at Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. 

‘I have been watching her for a long time and I was a little surprised. She was extraordinarily nasty to Judge Kavanaugh, now Justice Kavanaugh. She was nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing, the way she was, the way she treated now Justice Kavanaugh. And I won’t forget that soon,’ Trump said of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing,’ Trump said.  

‘I thought she was the meanest, the most horrible, most disrespectful of anybody in the U.S. Senate’ toward Kavanaugh, who faced accusations of rape during his confirmation hearing, which Kavanaugh denied. 

‘She was my number one pick, as they would say,’ Trump said. ‘She was my number one draft pick, and we’ll see how she works out,’ he added, saying she did ‘poorly’ in the primaries.

Trump also called her a ‘person who’s told very many stories that aren’t true,’ and made repeated efforts to tie her to the ‘radical left.’ 

Trump was much higher on Harris when he got asked about her just days ago on July 29th, when she was already in the news as a potential pick. ‘I think she’d be a fine choice, Kamala Harris, she’d be a fine choice,’ Trump said at the White House.

His campaign steered clear of the same harsh personal attacks in a press call with reporters that mostly focused on ideology, although the campaign only allowed for two questions before ending it.   

Sen. Marsha Blackburn on the call accused Harris of being for sanctuary cities and ‘open borders,’ but notably did not repeat Trump’s accusations of Harris being mean and nasty.   

The attacks from the White House podium came after Biden  selected as his nominee the former rival who delivered the most cutting attack of the 2020 nominating process – a fellow member of the Senate ‘club’ who accused him of working on segregationists and opposing school bussing.

It was a dramatic moment it did not take the Trump campaign long to recall. Team Trump blasted out a web video shortly after her selection calling Harris a ‘phony’ and ‘attacking Joe Biden for racist policies.’

It also sought to cast her as part of the ‘radical left,’ although one reason Biden may have selected Harris is her record as a former California attorney general, potentially blunting attacks on any nominee. 

The video flashed an image of Harris’ performance in a a debate, where Harris knocked Biden back with her attack.

‘Meet phony Kamala Harris!’ the Trump campaign wrote in a tweet containing the video. 

A Trump campaign text called her ‘Phony Kamala,’ using her first name only, an indication that may be the insult Trump seeks to brand her with. 

On the debate stage, Harris accused Biden of ‘working with segregationists’ and told him: ‘had those segregationists their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate,’ she told him.

At another debate, she accused Biden of opposing bussing, although he denied it. 

‘There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me,’ Harris said.

She added: ‘I will tell you that on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats. We have to take it seriously. We have to act swiftly.’

Harris followed up by posting an image of herself as a girl when she was bussed to school.

Biden shot back at Harris for her time as a California prosecutor.

‘I did not praise racists,’ he told her. ‘If we want to have this litigated on who supports civil rights, I’m happy to do that,’ he added. ‘I was a public defender. I was not a prosecutor.’

He has also stood by his pledge to work with Republicans, and defended efforts to work with those he disagreed with in his own party during his decades-long Senate career. 

Biden’s decision to select Harris over several other women indicates he has buried the hatchet. Online Tuesday he called her ‘a fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants.’

He also lauded her for working with his late son, Beau, who served as the attorney general for Delaware.

‘Back when Kamala was Attorney General, she worked closely with Beau. I watched as they took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I’m proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign,’ Biden said.  

Biden had earlier held up ‘civility’ and spoken about his time working with people he disagreed with like Democratic segregationists in the Senate.  Harris called the remark ‘hurtful.’

Biden admitted he was thrown off by the harsh attack after Harris first launched it. 

”Sure they were going to come after me. I was prepared for them to come after me, but I wasn’t prepared for the person coming at me the way she came at me,’ Biden told CNN of the debate confrontation. ‘She knows me,’ he told CNN afterward.

‘I get all this information about other people’s past and what they’ve done and not done. I’m not going to go there,’ he said. 

The Trump video accuses Biden of ‘handing the reins to Kamala while they jointly embrace the radical left,’ a sign Trump plans to hammer both of his rivals.

But may be Harris’ own prosecutorial chops that most drew Biden to her. As his running mate, she is likely spend considerable time attacking Trump, who Biden himself has accused of stoking racism.