Former US president Donald Trump on Saturday launched fresh personal attacks against White House rival US Vice President Kamala Harris, as new polling showed her making major gains in key battleground states ahead of the Democratic National Convention, which starts tomorrow.
Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania, the Republican presidential candidate began by blaming Harris for unleashing “devastating” inflation — one of the biggest issues of the campaign — but he soon drifted off script, mocking Harris’s laugh and calling her a “communist” and a “lunatic.”
At one point, criticizing a portrait of Harris on the cover of Time magazine, Trump said he was “much better looking than her.”
Photo: Bloomberg
Republicans and Trump advisers — concerned by Harris’ energized campaign — have publicly urged him to stick to the issues and lay off the personal attacks, which they believe play badly with the undecided and independent voters he needs to win the Nov. 5 election.
However, the former president has shown no sign of changing his populist, confrontational style.
“You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter for a second, do you?” he asked the crowd about 15 minutes into his speech, before proceeding to reel off a now familiar list of insults at Harris.
“People say: ‘Please don’t use bad language. Please don’t call people stupid. Please, don’t call her a lunatic,’” Trump said. “And I said: ‘But that’s what she is, she’s a lunatic.’”
The momentum in the White House race has shifted dramatically since US President Joe Biden abruptly pulled out on July 21, with Harris’ whirlwind entry enthusing the Democratic Party base.
A survey by the New York Times and Siena College published on Saturday had Harris storming back into contention in four critical battleground states that Trump had looked set to win comfortably against Biden.
The poll is likely to trigger further consternation among Trump’s campaign team, with Harris ahead in Arizona and North Carolina, and getting closer in Nevada and Georgia.
At the rally on Saturday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump skewered Harris on her historic opposition to fracking — an unpopular stance in the state, which is the second-largest natural gas-producing US state after Texas.
However, he spent far longer reviewing his debate performance against Biden in June, and on meandering anecdotes about everyone from Italian screen legend Sophia Loren to French President Emmanuel Macron.
With polls showing the head-to-head race very close, it is the swing states — especially Pennsylvania — that will decide the final result under the US electoral college system.
Trump lost the state by a narrow margin against Biden in 2020, but has solid support in rural areas and small towns.
Harris was yesterday scheduled to visit Pennsylvania, making several stops on her campaign bus near Pittsburgh before heading to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home