In the two months since President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign, Republicans have pursued an incredible number of attack lines against Vice President Kamala Harris. Voters have heard criticisms covering everything from her laugh to her affection for Venn diagrams, her occasional glass of wine to her hugging people.
Some GOP attacks, however, have been far more offensive. Donald Trump questioning the Democrat’s racial identity in deeply ugly ways, for example, was so indefensible that many in her party preferred not to talk about it.
But the former president’s latest rhetoric was every bit as disgusting. The Washington Post reported:
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’s mental capacity Saturday, falsely claiming she was born “mentally impaired” and comparing her actions to that of “a mentally disabled person.”
To be sure, this isn’t entirely new. In early August, the GOP nominee described his Democratic rival as “a LOW I.Q. INDIVIDUAL,” “really DUMB,” having “an extremely Low IQ” and lacking the “mental capacity” to debate him.
Nearly two months later, however, Trump is leaning into this in bizarre ways.
“Joe Biden became mentally impaired,” he said at a weekend rally. “Kamala was born that way. She was born that way.” While struggling to pronounce the vice president’s name, he went on to suggest Harris is “a mentally disabled person,” adding that he considers her “a very dumb person.”
In case that weren’t quite enough, Trump said his Democratic rival is “stupid” and has “cognitive problems.”
There’s no shortage of relevant angles to such rhetoric. The Republican nominee, for example, already has a dreadful record when it comes to people with disabilities, and his latest ugliness won’t help.
What’s more, perhaps Trump could explain, if she is so “impaired,” why Harris was able to humiliate him with relative ease during their recent debate.
It’s also worth emphasizing that as GOP officials practically beg the former president to focus on policy instead of personal attacks, Trump — who has said he feels “entitled” to take the presidential race into the gutter — clearly can’t help himself.
But even if we put all of those relevant angles aside, it’s not hard to wonder why Trump, of all people, would want to put mental acuity in the campaign spotlight.
A few days before targeting Harris’ intellect, the former president referred to Charlottesville as “Charlottestown.” A few days before that, he mixed up Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. In early September, Trump urged people in New Hampshire to vote against Biden, apparently forgetting that Biden isn’t running. Two weeks earlier, he seemed to forget which state he was in during a campaign rally. It came against a backdrop of weird Trump rhetoric about bacon and wind power, as well as his fear of sharks, which apparently had something to do with electric boat batteries. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently noted, Trump “is very obviously sharply declining before our eyes,” and MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem added: “Trump has been embedded in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for so long that it can be easy to forget how far he is from fulfilling the basic requirement of a politician to speak clearly. Trump’s speeches seem to be growing more discursive and difficult to comprehend by the day.” They’re not the only ones who’ve noticed. The New York Times recently published a related analysis noting that the Republican nominee “has mixed up names, confused facts and stumbled over his points. Mr. Trump’s rambling speeches, sometimes incoherent statements and extreme outbursts have raised questions about his own cognitive health.” If the 2024 presidential election comes down to which candidate appears to be “impaired,” the GOP nominee probably ought to start lowering his expectations.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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