After Donald Trump’s bizarre attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris in a phone interview on Fox News Thursday morning, her campaign fired back with a blistering response of its own.
The Harris campaign sent out an email minutes later with the subject line “Statement on a 78-year-old criminal’s Fox News appearance,” wondering “is Donald Trump ok?” They called out Trump for “lying and making threats,” praising abortion bans while criticizing mail-in-voting, and being “old and quite weird.”
The email also notes, “If anyone wants an alternative, Kamala Harris is offering one.”
It’s a quick and snarky response that is sure to land well with Democrats and younger voters. Harris already scored points against Trump when she kicked off her campaign Monday, highlighting her history as a prosecutor against Trump’s legally questionable record. These biting criticisms of Trump seem to have set off his meltdown Thursday.
In the Fox News appearance the email referred to, Trump was not happy about Harris’s Monday speech, calling it “disgusting.”
“They say, ‘Sir, be nice. You just got hit with a bullet. Maybe he’s changed. Be nice,’ and I’d love to be nice, but I’m dealing against real garbage when you hear that,” Trump said. He went on to connect Harris’s criticism to the many legal cases against him.
“When you hear that they’ve weaponized the justice system against me, they’ve indicted me four times. They’ve pushed other lawsuits on. To me, it’s never happened in this country,” Trump ranted. “This is like a third-world country, what they’ve done, a banana republic. Every single court case that I have is pushed on by them.”
If this is how Trump will respond to future attacks from the Harris campaign, it probably won’t do anything beyond the MAGA base. Trump’s complaints about the cases against him didn’t land earlier this year, and they probably won’t pick up steam by including Harris.
The Trump campaign has already resorted to making racist attacks against Harris by calling her a “DEI candidate” and claiming she was soft on crime as a prosecutor. Meanwhile, he keeps making things worse for himself. At a rally Wednesday, he confused Harris with his old opponent Nikki Haley. If Harris can keep landing attacks like this, and Trump keeps making bizarre gaffes, the Democrats could go into Election Day with all of the momentum.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday that it is not clear whether Donald Trump was struck by a bullet during the assassination attempt against him earlier this month.
Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Wray testified about the agency’s investigation into the attempted assassination, expressing uncertainty about the nature of the injury Trump suffered to his ear.
At one point, Republican Representative Kevin Kiley asked, “How close did the assassin’s bullet come to killing President Trump?” Wray responded that he didn’t know the actual distance, but “my understanding is that either [the bullet] or some shrapnel is what grazed his ear.”
Later in the hearing, Wray replied to a question from House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan about where the eight bullets fired by Thomas Crooks went. “With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray again said. However, in affirming that the FBI “accounted for” all of the shots, he added, “I don’t know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else.”
Over the weekend, Trump told a Michigan crowd, “I took a bullet for democracy.” The same day, Axios reported on a memo, written by Trump’s former White House physician and shared by his campaign, that stated the bullet struck Trump’s ear, coming “less than a quarter of an inch from entering [Trump’s] head” and “produc[ing] a 2 cm wide wound.”
While Wray revealed, among other information, that Crooks researched the killing of JFK and flew a drone over the site prior to his attempt on Trump’s life, his remarks about the basic facts surrounding the former president’s injury show that uncertainty still looms over our understanding of the event.
Wray told the committee, “There’s a whole lot of work underway and still a lot of work to do, and our understanding of what happened and why will continue to evolve.”
More on 2024 election chaos:
The Kamala Harris campaign released its first promotional video Thursday morning, titled “We choose freedom.” And it highlights one of Donald Trump’s favorite photos: his mugshot.
Soundtracked to Beyoncé’s 2016 song “Freedom,” the campaign ad alternates between footage of Harris, her supporters, and B-roll footage, over which the vice president and 2024 candidate says, “In this election we each face a question: What kind of country do we want to live in?”
Cutting to footage of Trump and J.D. Vance, Harris’s voiceover continues, “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us, we choose something different. We choose freedom.”
It also mentions choosing “a future where … no one is above the law,” at which point the video cuts to Trump’s 2023 Fulton County Jail mug shot—an image the Trump campaign itself has used on its website and merchandise—as well as a flurry of news headlines, timed to the soundtrack’s percussion, about his recent 34 felony convictions.
The video emphasizes a number of other issues one can expect to be key points of Harris’s campaign, including reproductive freedom, gun violence, childhood poverty, and affordable health care.
The ad closes with Harris saying, “We believe in the promise of America, and we’re ready to fight for it. Because when we fight we win.” It echoes themes that Harris, who entered the 2024 race after Biden’s exit just earlier this week, introduced at her first rally on Wednesday, where she said the upcoming election is “a choice between freedom and chaos.”
More on the new 2024 race:
Donald Trump’s Republican allies are worried that he might be underestimating Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to a report from Rolling Stone, several Republicans, including two right-wing lawmakers, have reached out to the convicted felon and former president to warn him about internal GOP polls that show Harris could make key states that Trump needs a lot more difficult to win. They also told him that assurances from his team that Harris was a weak opponent were wrong and that racist and sexist attacks from the right wing could easily backfire.
The report cites three sources, one of whom told the magazine that “when Joe Biden was in the race, we were headed for a Trump landslide.”
“Now that it’s Kamala’s turn, there are some scenarios that make me nervous,” said the source, who has discussed the issue with Trump.
Before Biden withdrew from the 2024 election and endorsed Harris, Trump was ahead in national and battleground state polls, particularly after Biden’s poor debate performance. Since Biden’s announcement Sunday, though, Trump has raged on Truth Social and Harris has skyrocketed in popularity, raising record amounts of money. Trump’s supporters are openly panicking, making weak attempts at impeaching Harris in the House and resorting to racist attacks.
Will any of that work in the face of growing enthusiasm for Harris from young people? The boost to the Democrats’ flagging fortunes even has the Trump campaign wondering if J.D. Vance was the wrong choice to be Trump’s running mate. Harris already has hit Trump with some smart attacks in the last couple of days, and Trump seems to be scared of debating her. Harris’s next move would be to pick a good running mate of her own, preferably one who won’t alienate her base while still assuring swing voters.
On what a Kamala ticket could look like:
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