With two weeks left in a tight race for the presidency, Donald Trump on Tuesday escalated his vicious attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, making several demeaning personal insults at two campaign events.
The onslaught echoed a pattern from his 2016 and 2020 campaigns when Trump ramped up his often-wild personal barbs against his opponents as Election Day drew near. He accused Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020 of drug use without evidence.
But with Trump facing tight polls and analysts predicting narrow margins in battleground states, the former president’s allies have for months urged him to tone down his attacks against Harris and focus on issues. They have expressed concern that Trump may risk alienating undecided voters who might be amenable to his political views but turned off by his coarse rhetoric.
Trump has shown no signs of heeding their guidance and if anything has stepped up the frequency and coarseness of his insults, including using profanity to refer to Harris on Saturday. Tuesday’s flurry of insults had no swear words but included some swipes that compared the vice president of the United States to an animal and baselessly questioned whether she was a substance abuser.
Though Trump has for months expressed contempt for Harris, he had previously reserved his most disparaging language about her for private settings. But as he has become more anxious about her financial edge and as he has struggled to make any single line of criticism against her stand out to voters, he has increasingly fallen back on a variety of wildly false personal attacks as a way to diminish her support.
During a meandering speech at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, that stretched for nearly two hours, Trump called Harris a “low IQ individual” and at one point said she “froze like a dog” when her teleprompter froze. He made an unfounded insinuation that she might have a drinking problem and may be abusing drugs and said she was not “mentally or physically able” to be president, as he himself stumbled at times to recall his own words during his speech.
Trump attacked Harris, who took meetings in Washington and recorded two media interviews, for not holding any campaign stops Tuesday. In Greensboro, he accused her of spending the day “sleeping.” Earlier, at an event at his resort in Doral, Florida, he called Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, “lazy as hell, and she’s got that reputation,” evoking a racist trope.
This attack, too, bore echoes from campaigns past. Trump has knocked the work ethic of his opponents throughout his political career. But his criticism of Harris comes as their two campaigns have exchanged jabs over who has more energy and who is working harder in the last stretch of the race.
Harris and her allies have repeatedly suggested that Trump, who is 78, is too “exhausted” to serve another term as president. Her campaign shared a video in which Trump appeared to nod off at a campaign event Friday in Michigan, and Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, said Tuesday that Trump didn’t have the “stamina” to be president.
Trump has pointed to his campaign schedule as evidence of his fitness, frequently citing an inconsistent number of days he has been campaigning without taking a break. “I’ve got 52 days now,” he told hundreds gathered in the events center at the Greensboro Complex. “I got 14 more. We don’t take days off.” Hours earlier, his campaign had canceled a virtual town hall that he was scheduled to take part in, citing a “scheduling change” as the reason without providing additional details.
Trump has shown signs of weariness on the campaign trail, with his energy flagging at some events on packed days. During his Greensboro rally, he made some verbal errors as he often jumped abruptly from scripted remarks to other topics of his choosing, including discussing limestone’s porosity as he lamented vandalism in Washington during his presidency.
While acknowledging the Front Row Joes — devoted superfans he often points out during his rallies — he first called them the Front Row Jacks, then corrected himself by calling them “the Front Row Jacks and Joes.”
As he attacked Harris, he said that “something’s wrong with his vice president,” misgendering her and improperly referring to her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. Discussing a campaign stop at McDonald’s, he struggled to find the word fryer, saying, “Those french fries were good. They were right out of the, uh — they were right out of whatever the hell they make them out of.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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