Kamala Harris challenges Donald Trump to cognitive test as Joe Biden casts vote

The Trump campaign went into damage control over a comedian’s joke. Kamala Harris threw down a cognitive test challenge. Joe Biden voted. Here’s what you missed overnight.

He’s not on the ballot, but Joe Biden was set to vote early, presumably for Kamala Harris, in his home state of Delaware. Under US law, he could also write in the name of a candidate not listed. Such as himself.

Big-brained move: Ms Harris, who has so far struggled to differentiate herself from Mr Biden, has gone where the president hadn’t dared go before: Challenging Donald Trump to a cogitative test.

■ Donald Trump has been trolling “low IQ Kamala” for weeks on the campaign trail, most recently during his 3-hour podcast with Joe Rogan. “She’d be laying on the floor comatose,” Mr Trump said of how Ms Harris would struggle if she faced Rogan.

■ Mr Biden refused challenges of a cognitive test in the months before he was replaced, but Ms Harris has flipped the script on Mr Trump, saying she would “challenge him to take the same one”.

■ “This is what he has resorted to, and I think he actually is increasingly unstable and unhinged and has resorted to name-calling,” she said, adding “he is unfit to be president again, should never be president again, and is dangerous.”

• Read more: What Trump 2.0 means for world leaders

US President Joe Biden greets voters outside a polling as he casts his vote in Delaware. Picture: AFP

Sorry, not sorry: The Trump campaign made the unusual step of distancing the president from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe after a joke about the “floating island of hot garbage”, Puerto Rico. 

■ Campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said in a statement: “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” While there was no explicit mea culpa, the mere acknowledgement of the controversy shows it has done some damage.

■ There are an estimated 5.8 million Puerto Ricans in the US, with just under 500,000 in the swing state of Pennsylvania; where the margin of victory was 80,555 in 2020. The population of Puerto Ricans also outnumbers the winning margins in Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina.

■ Hinchcliffe, for his part, said the joke was taken out of context to make it seem racist: “These people have no sense of humour”. But with the fallout overshadowing Mr Trump’s Madison Square Garden extravaganza, the former president’s allies fell over themselves to denounce the joke and its author. 

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Donald Trump and his wife former US First Lady Melania Trump wave at Madison Square Garden. Picture: AFP

Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque: The firestorm threatens to stall Mr Trump’s momentum in the closing week of the election.

■ After reclaiming the lead in the national popular vote for the first time since August 4, Mr Trump will this week travel to New Mexico in an attempt to expand the battleground states.

■ Ms Harris, meanwhile, will deliver her closing speech this week in Washington DC at the Ellipse, the park where Mr Trump encouraged his supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically” on January 6, 2020. Just as a riot broke out at the US Capitol.

Read more: New states in play as Trump takes lead for first time since Biden exit

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