Donald Trump calls Kamala Harris an angry and mad woman

Donald Trump called Joe Biden’s running mate ‘a mad woman’ as he broadened his attack on ‘crazy’ leading female Democrats.

Kamala Harris in Wilmington, Delaware. Picture: AFP

President Donald Trump called Joe Biden’s running mate “a mad woman” as he broadened his attack on “crazy” leading female Democrats despite a poll showing that Kamala Harris is regarded as moderate by many US voters.

Some Republicans fear that Mr Trump is falling into a Democratic “trap” with his attacks on Senator Harris, the first black woman chosen as a vice-presidential candidate, given that women make up 54 per cent of voters and recent polls show a majority of them oppose the president.

Mr Biden, 77, and Ms Harris, 55, had an 8 percentage-point lead in the first opinion poll since she was announced as his running-mate on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST). It was an unchanged margin for Mr Biden over Mr Trump, 74, and Mike Pence, 61, his Vice President.

It became clearer on Thursday that the Democratic duo will focus their attacks on Mr Trump over his response to the pandemic, with their first event together based around an expert briefing on the coronavirus. Mr Biden assembled a team of advisers in March including Vivek Murthy, a former US surgeon-general, and he has been briefed almost daily.

Mr Trump, referring to Senator Harris’s questions to Brett Kavanaugh, his Supreme Court nominee, at his Senate hearing in 2018, told Fox News: “You have a sort of a mad woman, I call her, because she was so angry and such hatred with Justice Kavanaugh. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it. She was the angriest of the group and they were all angry.”

Polling by Morning Consult found that Ms Harris was seen as less extreme than either Mr Trump or Mr Pence. She was placed just to the left of Mr Biden but not as close to the end of an ideological scale as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, two of the most radical Democratic senators.

“The Trump campaign’s attempt to frame Harris as a radical who would be the one actually pulling the strings in a Biden administration faces a roadblock: Trump and Mike Pence are perceived as more extreme,” Morning Consult said.

The most positive views on Senator Harris were for her support for raising taxes on the rich and restrictions on gun ownership, while her biggest weaknesses were on her support for providing undocumented immigrants with government healthcare and for decriminalising illegal border crossings.

Although Mr Trump has called Ms Harris “my No 1 draft pick”, 45 per cent of Republicans said that they were worried by Mr Biden’s choice.

Donald Trump Jr retweeted an attack on Senator Harris over her 2004 decision as district attorney of San Francisco not to pursue the death penalty for a gang member who shot dead a policeman. He tweeted: “Kamala protected a cop killer from the death penalty … Disgusting!”

Senator Harris said at the time that there was a majority in San Francisco against capital punishment and she pushed for life without parole. Polls show that most US voters support the death penalty, which has been revived at a federal level by the Trump administration, but which Mr Biden opposes.

In the 24 hours after she was named Mr Biden’s running-mate his campaign raised a record $US26m ($36.4m), including from 150,000 first-time donors.

Mr Trump appeared to confirm on Thursday that he opposed Democratic calls for a funding boost for the US Postal Service because he wanted to make it harder to expand postal voting, which he argues could be rigged.

“They want $25bn for the post office. Now, they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots … But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting,” he told Fox Business.

Mr Biden commented: “Pure Trump. He doesn’t want an election.”

The Times