Donald Trump has clearly struggled to adjust to the new presidential race against Vice President Kamala Harris, and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman says there are “two things” that are upsetting the former president.
“First, she closed the voting gap with him in a fairly short period of time, and he had become very accustomed to running against Joe Biden. That was comfortable for him,” Haberman said told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday.
“He knew what the line of attack was, and his campaign had spent a lot of time and money on that. But she’s a woman, and she’s a black woman, and both of those factors have proven quite challenging for him in the past.
“His allies will say that he is an equal opportunity perpetrator and that he goes after everyone – and it is certainly true that he offends a wide variety of people – but he seemed to really struggle with female opponents, female critics and especially black women who do. critics,” she added.
In the weeks since President Joe Biden ended his candidacy and Harris took up the mantle, Trump has questioned Harris’ racial identity, used several bizarre nicknames for her, told easily debunked lies that images of her huge rally crowds were taken with artificial means. intelligence, and strangely enough compared her appearance with that of his wife, Melania Trump.
According to a Saturday New York Times In a report by Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the Republican candidate also privately called his Democratic rival a “bitch” and “filthy.”
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Haberman said it’s clear that Trump and his campaign are “doing quite a good job to lure her and lure Democrats into a fight over race.”
“And you know, that’s something that the Harris campaign hasn’t addressed so far,” she added.
Despite pleadings As some Republicans and donors stayed on message, Trump’s camp appeared unable to resist race-based attacks. On Tuesday, the Trump campaign posted a racist tweet suggesting that suburban neighborhoods would be overrun by black people and immigrants if Harris became president.
The journalist also noted that Trump is “so disoriented [that it] has made him quite susceptible to manipulation.”
“He has a lot of people around him who either support conspiracy theories, or are unhappy with what they see as the establishment, or are critical of certain types of Republicans,” she said. ‘And when he feels cornered, he tends to listen to those people. He clearly feels cornered now.”
Trump’s erratic behavior is similar to how he has behaved in previous periods of tension or anxiety, she noted, adding: “The number of people we’ve spoken to who just say he seems very tense is not small.”