New York: Donald Trump, who is campaigning to return to the White House to avenge his defeat in 2016, continued his attacks on Kamala Harris and this time resorted to gestures about her personal life in his latest speech.
“We have to work hard to define her,” said Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, while addressing a rally in Atlanta on Saturday and along with his running mate J.D. Vance, he accused his Democratic rival of the shortcomings of President Joe Biden’s governance and portrayed her as an “ultra-radical”.
Trump, highlighting her political past, added a sly reference to Willie Brown, a powerful California politician who is 30 years older than her and with whom Harris had a romantic relationship decades ago before she started actively getting involved in politics.
“She had a very good friend named Willie Brown,” Trump said, criticizing her career as a loose prosecutor. “He knows more about her than anybody. He can tell you every single thing about her, tell you stories and you won’t want to hear it”.
And then he continued the professional criticism, calling her a Marxist, left-wing prosecutor who was soft on murderers and rapists.
On Wednesday, Trump made a bizarre claim about Harris, telling a conference of black reporters that she had always claimed to be Indian and had recently spoken about her African heritage on her Jamaican father’s side.
In fact, Harris has always made her African heritage her primary identity, writing in her memoir that her mother wanted her and her sister to be raised as African Americans because that way they would be viewed through an American racial lens.
In one of his many epithets mocking Harris, he pronounced her name “Ka-ma-la”, which drew criticism.
Responding to the backlash, he said at Saturday’s rally, “There are 19 different ways to say it; she only has to say it.” Three choices”. He made several changes and then went back to the same pronunciation, adding “crazy” to his accent.
On Saturday, just a day after Harris clinched the nomination in an electronic poll of her party convention delegates, Trump was holding his rally at the same place where Harris had challenged him on Tuesday, saying, “The momentum is changing in this race and there are signs that Donald Trump is realizing it.”
Trump’s lead in the poll has dropped to 1.2 percent, according to a RealClear Politics poll.
In Georgia, his lead over Harris overall is 2 percent, while he trails Biden in four of the seven battleground states that could go either way and determine the outcome of the election.
Georgia put several markers in his political timeline: He lost the state by a slim margin in 2016 and reportedly tried to ask state officials to overturn it, for which he is accused of election interference.
It will be a big boost for the Democratic campaign that Trump congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on the prisoner swap while attempting to claim Biden is weak.
“I want to congratulate Vladimir Putin on making another great deal,” he said, referring to an international list of Russian spies, a murderer and hackers released by Western countries.
He claimed he never paid for the release of American prisoners held abroad.
But he said that under Biden’s deal to free three Americans, including Wall Street Journal reporter Ivan Gershkovich, “he released some of the biggest killers in the world” and that sets a bad precedent.
In a speech that was filled with bravado, exaggeration, outright inaccuracies and fantastic promises, Trump reiterated many of his criticisms of the Biden administration – inflation, the border crisis with an influx of illegal immigrants, crime and a flow of deadly narcotics.
He launched a renewed attack on the economy on Friday with a report showing the unemployment rate rose for a fourth consecutive month to 4.3 percent, raising fears of a recession.
He and Vance reinforced their claims of Harris being radical, particularly by appealing to the party’s left wing given her disastrous campaign for the party’s nomination in 2016.
Vance, who spoke at the start of the rally, raised some of the same issues but added elements of the divisive culture war.
He took issue with the inclusion of sexually explicit books in schools, allowing men to use women’s and girls’ restrooms, and the inclusion of transgender people in women’s sports, and claimed these would be banned under Trump.
Under criticism for derogatory statements about women, such as calling women without children “cat ladies,” he spoke about the strong women in his life, his “mama” — the nanny — who raised him and was a straightforward figure who kept him on the straight path.
(IANS)
