Speaking to a crowd in Erie, Pa., on the last Saturday in September, former president Donald Trump lambasted his Democratic opponent.
“Crooked Joe Biden became mentally impaired — sad — but Lyin’ Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way,” he said, mispronouncing the Democratic presidential nominee’s name as the crowd chuckled. “There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something missing.”
Ten minutes later, he offered an even blunter assessment, warning that the nation’s immigration system was being mismanaged by “stupid people like Kamala.”
“She’s a stupid person,” he said, before adding again, as if for emphasis: “Stupid person.”
Since Harris emerged on the top of the Democratic ticket in July, Trump has repeatedly attacked her intelligence — deriding her as a “dumb,” “mentally unfit,” “slow,” “stupid,” and an “extremely low IQ person,” among other similar pejoratives.
To some of the former president’s fiercest supporters, he is simply stating a truth and articulating aloud their view of her. But for many voters, as well as experts, Trump’s sneering dismissiveness of Harris’s intellect reeks of racism and sexism.
If elected, Harris — who is Black and Indian American — would make history as the first female president, as well as the first female president of color, and Trump’s repeated jabs at her intelligence go beyond mere insults.
The attacks are particularly striking given Harris’s deeply accomplished résumé: former San Francisco district attorney, former California attorney general, former U.S. senator and now vice president.
“This lands differently when you do this to women of color, because you’re saying, ‘How dare you get out of the box I put you in,’” said A’shanti Gholar, president of Emerge, an organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office.
“There is a history in the United States about the perception of Black people, about the perception of Black women, that we’re not smart enough, that we’re not good enough, that you only get to where you are because of affirmative action,” she said. “So when you attack people of color, when you attack the vice president, you’re really showing that you have these biases.”
The Trump campaign rejected the notion that Trump’s questioning of Harris’s intelligence is in any way racist or sexist.
“Only dumb and low IQ individuals would be offended by that, expressing faux outrage because they need every excuse to explain away their insecure, miserable, and pathetic existence,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. “Being unintelligent has nothing to do with race or gender. It has everything to do with Kamala Harris being wholly unqualified to be President because of all the hurt and misery she has brought to America.”
Harris has raised her own questions about Trump’s acuity and fitness for the job, though with less stark language and name-calling. In an interview with journalist Roland Martin last Monday, Harris accused Trump’s staff of deliberately keeping him from the public, noting he had recently pulled out of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview, has refused a second debate with her and won’t release his medical records.
“Why is his staff doing that?” she asked. “And it may be because they think he’s just not ready. And unfit and unstable.”
Trump’s digs at Harris’s intelligence began to intensify almost as soon as President Joe Biden bowed out of his reelection bid on July 21 and endorsed her. The very next day, Trump described Harris as “Dumb as a Rock” in a social media post.
He has since continued to press the theme. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning, Trump described her as “a low IQ person” who is “not smart.” The night before, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Manhattan, Trump’s comedy roast included a jibe at Harris’s intellect.
“We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the white-tie crowd. “This is a person that has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”
During an interview Tuesday at the Chicago Economic Club, Trump said Harris “is not as smart as Biden, if you can believe it.” And last Monday, he took to social media to call on her to “pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility,” and dismissed her recent appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” as “slow and lethargic.”
Trump’s attacks on her intelligence happen on an almost daily basis — and sometimes more than once a day. Trump described her as “dumber than hell” at the Detroit Economic Club on Oct. 10, and in Reading, Pa., on Oct. 9 warned, “People are realizing she’s a dumb person and we can’t have another dumb president.”
He continued: “Somebody said to me — one of my people, a nice person, a staff person — said, ‘Sir, please don’t call her dumb. The women won’t like it.’”
Trump has struggled with both Black and female voters. An NBC News poll conducted earlier this month found women supported Harris by a 14-point margin, with 55 percent preferring her and 41 percent preferring Trump. The same poll found that Harris also overwhelmingly leads Trump among Black voters, with 84 percent preferring her to the 11 percent who prefer Trump — although Trump has improved his margins slightly among Black women, to the consternation of the Harris campaign and Democrats.
Trump has so far refused to heed advice to avoid bad-mouthing Harris’s intelligence — in part because, as one confidant put it, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share a candid insight, “he doesn’t respect her as a worthy opponent.”
The Harris campaign declined to respond to questions about Trump questioning her intelligence. Her team has largely followed the vice president’s posture: not leaning into the history-making nature of her bid as potentially the first woman of color to be president, while dismissing Trump’s broadsides as “the same old tired playbook” that has left Americans exhausted and ready for change.
Last week, Harris accused Trump’s staff of hiding him away, rhetorically asking a large crowd in Greenville, N.C.: “Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?”
Trump has long viewed himself as a counterpuncher — forcefully attacking anyone who goes after him, including his White male opponents. Trump, 78, repeatedly went after Biden, 81, over his alleged cognitive abilities, arguing that the president was not physically or mentally capable of serving a second term.
But Trump also has a rich history of sexist attacks, and has reserved some of his most vituperative abuse for women of color. In 2018, Trump demeaned three Black female reporters in as many days, describing one as a “loser” and sneering at another, “You ask lots of stupid questions.” In 2019, amid a fight with House Democrats, Trump took to social media to encourage “The Squad” — a group of congresswomen of color — to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”
He has also attacked Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who is Black, as “low IQ Maxine Waters” and as “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”
For supporters of Harris, 60, the insults are deeply offensive and, they say, geared as firing up Trump’s base.
“There’s an air of misogyny about it, there’s an air of racism about it,” said Kim Barbaro, 49, a Democrat from Ottsville, Pa., in rural Bucks County. “There’s a lot of dog whistles going on when he speaks, so I’m hoping we’ve reached the tipping point with it, because it’s gotten so intense.”
“We need to return back to decency. He’s an unkind human and I’m not here for it,” she added.
Alexandra Moncure — a 35-year-old former Republican turned independent after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — took full-time leave from her marking job in Manhattan to volunteer at one of Harris’s Pennsylvania campaign offices and said she believes Trump’s attacks on the vice president’s intelligence come “from a place of insecurity.”
“I think it’s one of his approaches in terms of how he activates his base to attack people — on gender, on race, on anything that he views as something that could detract from her,” Moncure said.
Marjorie Margolies — a former Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication — arrived in Congress during the first “Year of the Woman” in 1992, when four women won election to the Senate, and said she is astonished that a presidential candidate deliberately treats his female opponent this way.
“It boggles my mind that this is acceptable behavior,” she said. “I’m stunned, I’m appalled, and mostly I’m surprised that there are that many people out there who think that this is acceptable behavior. And I’m oh so sad.”
But, she added, she thinks Harris’s handling of this particular brand of insult has been masterful.
“She doesn’t want to give it too much air,” Margolies said. “She doesn’t want to give it a place to resonate. I think that is smart.”
Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, remain largely undaunted by this line of attack, with many agreeing with and encouraging it. Julie Apfelbaum, a Republican who attended Trump’s recent Coachella rally in Harris’s home state of California, said Trump’s criticisms of Harris are totally justified.
“She’s stupid,” said Apfelbaum, an insurance broker from the Thousand Oaks, Calif., area, before offering a mocking rendition of Harris speaking. “She gets done talking, and it’s like, ‘What did she say?’ She said a bunch of nothing. She does a word salad, like they say.”
Later in the Coachella rally, the audience punctuated Trump’s speech with shouted insults at Harris. One man stood up from his seat to yell that Harris was dumber than a rock. Someone responded that they shouldn’t insult rocks.
Hannah Knowles in Coachella, Calif.; Maeve Reston in Washington Crossing, Pa.; Marianne LeVine in Oaks, Pa.; and Jeremy Merrill and Clara Ence Morse in Washington contributed to this report.