Former President Donald Trump on Thursday repeatedly demeaned opponent Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her “barely competent,” and made a string of false and often confusing claims about her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“He has positions that it’s not even possible to believe they exist. He’s going for things that nobody’s even heard of. Heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds,” Trump told reporters gathered for his first news conference since Harris announced Walz as her vice presidential pick.
Over about an hour, the former president fielded a variety of questions and swerved into familiar talking points, from criticizing Democrats over immigration and the economy to a rant accusing the party of conspiring against President Joe Biden. He insisted that his campaign strategy is unchanged now that Harris is his opponent and said he preferred running against her, at one point speculating that his performance with White male voters would go “through the roof.”
“I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all. It’s the same policies: open borders, weak on crime. I think she’s worse than Biden,” Trump said. “Because he got forced into the position. She was there long before.”
Asked about his light campaign schedule, Trump dismissed the question as “stupid” before saying that he’s been busy taping commercials, talking on his phone, the radio and on television programs. He noted, too, that he was holding a news conference, his first in months, before saying Harris “is not smart enough” to do one of her own. His last campaign event was over the weekend, when he rallied with running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance. Vance, for his part, has campaigned in the same states as Harris and Walz this week.
Trump also spent considerable time on Thursday complaining about media coverage of his campaign rallies, claiming at one point that the audience for his remarks on January 6, 2021 – shortly before the riots at the US Capitol – was his biggest ever and, in an absurd turn, compared favorably to the turnout for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
“If you look at what Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, it was a great speech. And you look at ours, same real estate, same everything. Same number of people, if not, we had more,” Trump said. “And you look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd and my crowd. We actually had more people. They said I had 25,000, and he had a million people and I’m OK with it because I like Dr. Martin Luther King.”
Trump’s rambling monologues cut a sharp contrast again the newly minted Democratic ticket, which is younger and, in its few appearances so far, more focused on its preferred issue set. The former president, meanwhile, seemed inclined to comment – often with lies or misleading claims – on every matter under the sun, from polling (“really good”) to the prospects of a new world war (“very close”).
His forays into more mainstream criticisms of Harris and the state of the country under President Joe Biden struck some familiar, if occasionally head-scratching, lines of attack.
“Now you have millions and millions of dead people, and you have people dying financially because they can’t buy bacon, they can’t buy food, they can’t buy groceries,” Trump said of Americans. “They can’t do anything. They’re living horribly in our country.”
Largely, though, Trump’s remarks were a rehashing of old grievances and a ramping up of newer, often insulting charges.
Jewish Americans supporting Harris, Trump said, “should have their head examined.”
“She’s been very, very bad to Israel and very bad to Jewish people,” he added. He did not specify how, nor that Harris is married to a Jewish man, second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
He went on to downplay the impact that abortion rights will have on the coming election, calling it a “very small issue” and “not a big factor anymore,” before falsely claiming – again – that Democrats support abortion “even after birth.”
The race for the White House, Trump added later, would not be competitive – so long as the election was fairly conducted, again falsely suggesting that past votes have not been.
“The (MAGA) base is 75% of the country,” Trump said, “far beyond the Republican party.”
In a minor reversal from past remarks, when he suggested he might not debate Harris at the previously appointed dates and times, Trump on Thursday announced that he had agreed to meet her on three occasions.
“I think it’s very important to have debates, and we’ve agreed with Fox on a date of September 4. We’ve agreed with NBC. Fairly full agreement subject to them on September 10. And we’ve agreed with ABC on September 25,” the former president said.
A senior Trump adviser and an ABC source familiar with the matter both said that the correct dates Trump has agreed to with networks are: September 4 with Fox News, September 10 with ABC and September 25 with NBC.
Trump said “minor details” were still being worked out, including audience and locations.
