In a Saturday speech that Donald Trump called “dark,” the Republican presidential nominee again hurled personal attacks toward his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. This time, he called her “very dumb,” claimed only a “mentally disabled” person could have done her job the way she has, and said she was born “mentally impaired.”
“Joe Biden became mentally impaired, Kamala was born that way,” Trump said during a rally in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. The crowd could be heard responding with laughs and cheers.
The backlash was swift, with some Republicans urging Trump to focus on the issues.
On CNN’s State of the Union, South Carolina senator and Trump ally Lindsey Graham said that while he believes Harris to be “crazy liberal,” he thinks “the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country.” When pressed during an interview with ABC’s This Week, US Representative Tom Emmer, a Republican from Minnesota, said, “I think we should stick to the issues. The issues are, Donald Trump fixed it once. They broke it. He’s going to fix it again. Those are the issues.”
Former governor and frequent Trump critic Larry Hogan of Maryland, also a Republican who is in a tight race for the Senate there, was more direct when addressing the nominee’s comments.
“I think that’s insulting not only to the vice president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities,” Hogan said. “Trump’s divisive rhetoric is something we can do without.”
“Trump made a great deal of the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden,” Eric Holder, the former attorney general who served in the Obama administration, said on MSNBC. He added, referring to the former president’s cognitive state, “If this is where he is now, where is he going to be three and four years from now?”
Following Saturday’s speech, Sarafina Chitika, a Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that “Donald Trump is finally telling the truth to voters: He’s got nothing ‘inspiring’ to offer the American people, just darkness.”
Disability rights advocates were also quick to denounce Trump’s remarks.
“Trump holds the ableist, false belief that if a person has a disability, they are less human and less worthy of dignity,” Maria Town, CEO and president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “These perceptions are incorrect, and are harmful to people with disabilities.”
Trump’s comments, Town noted, “say far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice President Harris, or any person with a disability.”
Since Trump had to pivot from running against President Joe Biden to combating an energized Harris bid, his advisors and some Republicans have urged the former president to veer away from personal attacks, like those about her gender and race. He, to put it briefly, hasn’t listened.
In an August speech, Trump went after Harris’s appearance, saying, “I’m much better looking than her. Much better. Much better. I’m a better looking person than Kamala,” and he’s taken a liking to calling Harris a “bitch,” per reporting from the New York Times based on two people who heard the remark on different occasions.
On Truth Social, the former president amplified a false claim that Harris used sexual acts to get ahead, reposting a photo of her and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which included the text, “Funny how blowjobs impacted both careers differently…”
Back in July, during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump lied about how Harris has portrayed her racial identity.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said of the vice president. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”