Former President Donald Trump ran through a list of grievances against Vice President Kamala Harris and other issues Saturday during an event aimed at linking his Democratic opponent to illegal border crossings.
A day after Harris immigration discussed at the US-Mexico border, Trump spoke to a crowd in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, about immigration. He accused Harris of allowing migrants to commit crimes after illegally entering the US, claiming she was responsible for “obliterating our border.”
“I will free Wisconsin from the massive migrant invasion,” he said. “We are going to liberate the country.”
The Republican candidate also intensified his personal attacks on Harris, insulting her as “mentally retarded” and a “disaster.”
“Joe Biden became mentally disabled,” Trump said. “Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And when you think about it, only a mentally challenged person could have let this happen to our country. Everyone would know this.’
The personal attacks have been something of a trend for Trump since Harris entered the race. In July, Trump wrongly questioned Harris’ racial identity during a panel with the National Association of Black Journalists.
“I didn’t know she was black until several years ago when she happened to become black and now she wants to be known as black,” Trump said at the time. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?”
When asked in a interview with CBS News last month, when he believed the personal attacks would hurt him with voters, he responded, “No, I don’t think so.”
Trump, meanwhile, hopes that frustration over illegal immigration will translate into votes in Wisconsin and other crucial swing states. The Republican candidate has labeled people crossing the US-Mexico border as “poisoning the blood of the country” and vowed to stage the largest deportation operation in US history if elected. And polls show that Americans believe Trump would do better than Harris on immigration.
Trump switched from topic to topic so quickly that it was sometimes difficult to keep track of what he meant. He talked about the two murder attempts against him, accusing the U.S. Secret Service of not being able to hold a large outdoor gathering instead of an event in a smaller indoor space. But he also made comments about climate change, Harris’ father, his beach body being better than President Biden’s, and a fly buzzing near him.
“I wonder where the fly came from,” he said. ‘Two years ago I wouldn’t have had a fly here. You change quickly. But we can’t stand it any longer. We can’t take it anymore.’
Trump repeatedly brought up Harris’ Friday event in Douglas, Arizona, where she announced an effort to do so further limit asylum applications beyond Biden’s executive order announced earlier this year. Harris denounced Trump’s handling of the border amid a bipartisan border package between the president and his opponents earlier this year, saying Trump “prefers to address a problem rather than solve a problem.”
“I had to sit there and listen,” Trump said last night, drawing cheers. ‘And who sets it up? Fox News. They shouldn’t be setting it up. It’s all lies. Everything she says is lies.”
Trump claimed not to understand what Harris meant when she said that he was responsible for taking children from their parents. Under his administration, border agents separated children from their parents at the US-Mexico border in a policy that was globally condemned as inhumane and that Trump himself ended under pressure from his own party.
Harris told his supporters at a rally in San Francisco that there were “two very different visions for our nation” and that voters see them “every day during the campaign.”
“Donald Trump is the same old tired show,” she said. “The same tired playbook we’ve been hearing for years.”
She said Trump was “a very unserious man.”
“However, the consequences of returning to the White House are extremely serious,” she said.
The Harris campaign Saturday Trump challenged again to a second debate, this time in the form of a football-themed television advertisement. After his rally in Wisconsin, Trump traveled to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on Saturday evening to attend the Alabama-Georgia football game, and the Harris campaign premiered the ad during the game.
“Champions know it can happen anytime, anywhere, but losers whine and doubt,” said the ad’s narrator.
