During rallies and on social media, former President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris.
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Lara Trump at the Philadelphia Convention Center after the presidential debate last month.
As the Republican Party strains to cast Donald J. Trump in a gentler light ahead of the fall election, Lara Trump volunteered a novel interpretation of the former president’s frequent, crude attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris’s intelligence: He’s kidding.
“Obviously, he’s kind of joking around there with the crowd at a Trump rally when he says those things,” Ms. Trump, the Republican Party chair and Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, claimed in an interview on NBC News on Tuesday.
In rallies and on social media, Mr. Trump has repeatedly disparaged Ms. Harris’s intellect during the campaign, declaring that she is “dumb as a rock” and “unable to put two sentences together.”
At a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, he suggested that Ms. Harris was “mentally disabled” and had been born that way.
Ms. Harris has a law degree and served as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California before being elected U.S. senator and then reaching the vice presidency, the highest public office any woman has ever held in the United States.
Mr. Trump’s crude remark on Saturday drew rebukes from several Republicans, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, who is running for the Senate.
The Trump campaign did not immediately reply to an inquiry about whether his comments about Ms. Harris’s intelligence had been intended as jokes.
The Harris campaign, which has typically avoided engaging with Mr. Trump’s crude attacks on the vice president, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview with CNN in August, Ms. Harris deflected a question about Mr. Trump’s attempts to question her racial identity by saying, “Same old, tired playbook — next question, please.”
Mr. Trump’s advisers have pushed him to focus on policy rather than personal attacks. And his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, spent much of a largely civil vice-presidential debate with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Tuesday night working to soften the former president’s edges.
But Mr. Trump continued to dispense personal insults about the Democratic ticket after the debate, writing on social media that “Walz was a Low IQ Disaster — Very much like Kamala.”
Ms. Trump, who did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment, offered her explanation for Mr. Trump’s insults during an appearance on NBC News’s “Meet the Press NOW” a few hours before the debate.
“This is Donald Trump, and he has never tried to make himself out to be anyone other than who he is,” Ms. Trump said of the former president, who spent decades engaging in mythmaking about his wealth.
See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Lara Trump, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Lindsey Graham, Larry Hogan
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Source: nytimes.com
