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

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President Trump has expressed surprise about Joe Biden’s pick for vice president, Kamala Harris, saying that the California senator had previously labeled 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.  

Biden named Harris as his running mate on Tuesday afternoon, 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.

By Tuesday night, the president continued to denounce Biden’s choice on Fox News.

‘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.  

Shortly after the news ohad been announced Trump revealed that he was ‘a little surprised’ given her ‘very poor’ primary performance.

‘She did very very poorly in primaries, she ended up right around two per cent,’ 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.   

‘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. 

But despite his surprise, Trump said that Harris would have also been his pick in order to secure victory and a second term in the White House. 

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

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. 

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.  

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  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.  

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 with 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 to spend considerable time attacking Trump, who Biden himself has accused of stoking racism.

From the start, some Biden advisers saw Harris as a logical choice. She was among the party’s most popular figures, a deft debater and a fundraising juggernaut. She had been thoroughly vetted during her own campaign and Biden’s team expected there would be few surprises if she was the pick.

Indeed, Harris’ potential downsides were well-known to Biden advisers. Her record as a prosecutor in California was already viewed skeptically by some younger Democrats during the primary and would face even more scrutiny against the backdrop of a national debate over inequality in the criminal justice system.

There were also nagging questions about Harris’ most high-profile moment of the primary campaign — a harsh and deeply personal broadside against Biden over his position on school busing in the 1970s. Though Biden would later brush the moment aside as campaign tactics, the attack was said to have stunned the former vice president, who had considered his relationship with Harris strong. It also raised concern among a small cadre of Biden advisers that Harris would be eyeing the Oval Office herself from the start, a particular worry given that Biden has not firmly committed to serving two terms if elected in November.

And so, as spring turned to summer, a string of other Black women would take a turn in the spotlight as Biden weighed his options. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Florida Rep. Val Demings impressed Biden’s team with their leadership during the police brutality protests.

Some House Democrats — including South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, a close Biden confidant — advocated for Rep. Karen Bass, a Californian who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus. Biden also took a strong interest in Susan Rice, with whom he worked closely when she served in the White House as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser.

The leading contenders, who also included Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, submitted reams of financial records, texts of speeches and other personal information. Biden’s selection team canvassed a vast array of Democrats to ask for their views on the candidates’ temperament and families, then grilled the candidates on much of the same.

Biden, too, regularly discussed his potential pick with his sprawling network of friends and advisers. He used Obama in particular as a sounding board, though confidants to both men say the former president was careful not to tip his hand in those conversations as to whom he preferred.

But in private, Obama suggested to others that he believed Harris was the favorite.

In one of Harris’ conversations with the vetting committee, Chris Dodd — a longtime Biden friend who served alongside him in the Senate — asked if she had remorse for her debate stage attack on his busing record.

Harris, as she had previously done so publicly, brushed it aside as simply politics. Dodd, a member of the running mate selection committee, was put off and let that be known. The incident was first reported by Politico and confirmed to The Associated Press by a person with direct knowledge.

The public disclosure of Dodd’s comments angered some of the highest-ranking women on Biden’s campaign team. Some of Harris’ allies also mobilized to defend her, including California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who organized a call with Biden’s vetting team about two weeks ago to assuage any doubts about whether the senator was the right choice for the ticket.

On the 45-minute call, Kounalakis and other statewide officials, labor and business leaders took turns sharing their personal histories with Harris and their impressions of her as a leader.

“Speaking out as strongly as we did, collectively, helped them understand how supported she is and why,” Kounalakis said on Tuesday.

The call ended with Biden’s vetting team telling the Harris supporters that they had all recommended her as one of the top candidates for the job.

The pandemic had largely grounded Biden in his home state of Delaware throughout the summer, and also upended some of the ways he had expected to build a rapport with the running-mate contenders. There were no joint rallies or carefully orchestrated, yet casual-looking, outings to local restaurants in battleground states. Biden was also accepting few in-person visitors at his home.

But he did want to speak one-on-one with the women who had made it through the vetting process and interviews with his selection committee. He would hold conversations with 11 women in the final nine days before he made his pick — a mixture of in-person meetings and video teleconferences.

Whitmer was among those who flew to Delaware for an in-person audience. She boarded a private plan in Lansing, Michigan, on August 2, spending just a few hours on the ground before returning to Michigan.

Rice, who had perhaps the closest personal relationship with Biden of all the contenders, spoke twice with Biden in recent days. Duckworth also had a formal interview over the weekend, as did Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who was initially viewed as a leading contender for the job.

On Tuesday, in the hours before his campaign announced Harris as the pick, Biden would call each of those women to inform them that they had not been selected. Warren, whose relationship with Biden has deepened in recent months through regular policy discussions, was also among those to receive a personal call from the former vice president.

In some of the conversations, Biden left open an opportunity. Please consider joining me in another role in the administration, he said.