The President says the senator isn’t competent enough to be the vice presidential nominee and suggests his daughter, Ivanka, would be a better candidate
Speaking in Londonderry, New Hampshire, Trump made fun of the California Democrat’s failed 2020 presidential campaign and suggested that his daughter, who is also a presidential adviser, would be a better vice presidential contender.
“You know, I want to see the first woman president also, but I don’t want to see a woman president get into that position the way she’d do it — and she’s not competent. She’s not competent. They’re all saying, ‘We want Ivanka.’ I don’t blame you,” Trump said.
The attack on Harris came a day after the President wrapped the Republican National Convention, which focused a large portion of its program on convincing voters that he is kind to women and has worked on behalf of Black Americans, messaging aimed at countering the President’s history of racist and sexist comments.
Harris, the first Black woman and the first South Asian American woman to accept a major party’s vice presidential nomination, has been a US senator representing California since 2017. Previously, she was the California attorney general and served as district attorney of San Francisco before that.
The President seemed to suggest on Friday that his off-script comments about Harris’ competence were meant solely for his supporters — not the larger number of American households watching his heavily scripted convention speech on television Thursday night.
After hearing pundits talk about how he had toned down his RNC speech, Trump told rallygoers in New Hampshire, “Well, it’s a different kind of a speech. Tonight, I’m in New Hampshire and we can wing it.”
“If I did last night’s speech here, right now you would have all been walking out,” he added. “And if I did tonight’s speech there, I would have been criticized by being slightly radical.”
CNN’s Donald Judd contributed to this report.
