Harris, Trump trade gender attacks as he floats Kennedy for ‘women’s health’
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris attacked former President Donald Trump on Thursday for claiming a day earlier that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not.” Later in the day, her campaign sought to pounce on a new remark Trump made stating that his ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would “work on women’s health” in his administration.
The Trump campaign, put on the defensive, lashed out at billionaire Mark Cuban, a top Harris surrogate, for insulting the intelligence of women close to the former president.
It was another hairpin turn that took the presidential race from literal trash talk to gender issues in its closing stage, with both candidates trying to inflict political wounds that will take days to heal as Americans cast their votes.
Harris, speaking from Wisconsin on Thursday morning, said Trump’s comments, made the evening earlier at a rally near Green Bay, Wisconsin, were “very offensive” to all Americans. Within minutes, the Trump campaign fired back: “Why does Kamala Harris take issue with President Trump wanting to protect women, men, and children from migrant crime and foreign adversaries?” said Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokesperson.
On Wednesday, Trump had rolled into a Green Bay-area rally in a garbage truck, trying to tie Harris to comments President Joe Biden made appearing to call Trump supporters “garbage.” The president had been criticizing a comic at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden who had disparaged Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”
But after Trump told the crowd that his advisers had urged him to stop using a well-worn rally line about his desire to protect women, saying they had called it “inappropriate,” the Harris campaign saw an opportunity to throw the focus of a race divided along gender lines squarely back onto her opponent.
“This is the same man who said women should be punished for their choices,” Harris said at her rally in Phoenix on Thursday afternoon. “He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly. But we trust women.”
She urged Arizonans to vote for a proposition that would enshrine access to abortion until fetal viability — about 24 weeks — in the state constitution, a change from the state’s current 15-week ban on the procedure.
Trump did not respond to the criticism at rallies Thursday, simply stressing that women were a part of his coalition.
But at his rally in Henderson, Nevada, outside Las Vegas, he gave Democrats a new opening by floating the idea that if he won, Kennedy, who ran as an independent before dropping out and endorsing Trump, would “work on health and women’s health and all of the different reasons, because we’re not really a wealthy or a healthy country.”
Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic who has promoted unproven theories about the dangers of pharmaceutical treatments, and he shifted his positions on abortion during his failed presidential bid. At one point, he supported federal restrictions on abortion after the first trimester of pregnancy before backtracking.
The Harris campaign and its allies quickly blasted out Trump’s comments on social media.
As Election Day nears, Harris has tried to appeal to moderate Republican and independent women, particularly in the suburbs, by talking about her support for reproductive rights and casting Trump as a threat to them.
She made her case in back-to-back rallies Thursday in Phoenix and Reno, Nevada. Later, she was set to appear in North Las Vegas with singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who is of Puerto Rican descent. Lopez is among a flood of Hispanic celebrities who signed on to help the Harris campaign in the days after Trump’s rally in New York.
At her rally in Phoenix, Harris offered pointed criticism of Trump’s treatment of immigrants by seeking to remind voters of his deeply unpopular policy of separating migrant children from their families during his administration.
“If elected, you can be sure he will bring back family-separation policies, only on a much greater scale than last time,” she said. Trump, when pressed, has declined to rule out reviving that policy.
Trump started Thursday with a rally in New Mexico, a notable detour from the top battleground states to one he lost by a wide margin four years ago. He then traveled to Henderson and was closing the day with an event near Phoenix.
His choice to hold a rally at the airport in Albuquerque raised eyebrows from political observers, given that New Mexico has not voted for a Republican since 2004. As he has tried to project confidence in his national appeal, he has made occasional trips to blue states.
He offered two explanations from the stage: a false claim about New Mexico’s elections, and an argument that the stop was “good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community.”
He then made some broad observations about Hispanic voters.
“I love Hispanics, and they’re hard workers, and, boy are they entrepreneurial, and they’re great people, and they are warm,” he said during a meandering 90-minute speech. “Sometimes they’re too warm, if you want to know the truth.”
He said similar at a more muted rally in Nevada where he repeated familiar grievances, attacks against Harris and false claims about the 2020 election. At one point, he suggested that Border Patrol officers could judge the character of migrants on sight.
The Trump campaign, eager to cut into Harris’ polling advantage with women, saw an opportunity in the comments from Cuban, who has been campaigning for Harris. Appearing on “The View,” he argued that Trump was never surrounded by “strong, intelligent women.”
Susie Wiles, effectively one of Trump’s two co-campaign managers, responded with a rare public statement. Cuban, she wrote on the social platform X, “needs help identifying the strong and intelligent women surrounding Pres. Trump. Well, here we are!”
A Trump adviser, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said that the campaign viewed Cuban’s remark as a condescending statement in the vein of Biden’s “garbage” remark, and that Wiles’ post was part of a coordinated effort to amplify it.
Hours later, Trump weighed in.
Arguing that Cuban “thinks he’s ‘hot stuff’ but he’s absolutely nothing,” the former president wrote on X that the billionaire was “very wrong, I surround myself with the strongest of women — With the understanding that ALL women are great, whether strong or not strong.”
Cuban tried to qualify his comments.
“I’m not saying that Republican women who vote for him aren’t smart and intelligent and strong. Many are,” he said after a small-business event in Atlanta, mentioning Kellyanne Conway and Elaine Chao, who served in the Trump administration. But he argued that such Republican women rarely played starring roles at Trump campaign events. “You don’t see him on the trail side by side with anybody. So they can jump on it all they want.”
In Harris’ remarks with reporters, she expanded her criticism of Trump beyond gender and also warned that he would again try to eliminate the Affordable Care Act if given a second term. As president, he tried and failed to repeal the health care law, which has since become popular with a majority of Americans.
Harris nodded to remarks this week by Speaker Mike Johnson, an ally of Trump’s, in which he said Republicans would pursue “massive reform” of the act if the former president won. At one point, Johnson seemed to agree with a voter who asked if there would be “no Obamacare” if Trump won and Republicans controlled Congress. “No Obamacare,” Johnson replied.
“Health care for all Americans is on the line in this election,” Harris said.
On Thursday, Johnson sought to clarify his comments.
“They took a clip out of context and said that I said that we were promising to repeal Obamacare,” he said during an appearance on the Fox Business Network. “That’s just not what I said, it’s actually the opposite of that.”
The former president hit back at Harris on his social media site.
“Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act,” Trump wrote. “I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing. She also said I want to end Social Security. Likewise, never mentioned it, or thought of it.”
As president, Trump repeatedly sought to overturn the Affordable Care Act. In his current campaign, he has expressed interest in replacing the act and supporting cuts to entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare.
But Harris spent the bulk of her time Thursday highlighting Trump’s remarks about keeping women safe even against their will, an approach he cast as paternal but that threatened to further upend his closing message to American voters.
The comments evoked his past use of or misogynistic words toward women, a civil court case that found him liable for sexual abuse and the accounts of roughly two dozen women who have said he had abused or attacked them.
His first presidential race was rocked in October 2016, when leaked audio from a past appearance on “Access Hollywood” caught him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals, remarks he later dismissed as “locker room banter.” In civil proceedings, Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Trump is appealing the case.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.