“You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter for a second, do you?” Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump asked his Pennsylvania crowd at a campaign rally on Saturday—less than four minutes into his speech.
What followed was a long-winded, meandering address that featured Trump insisting that he is more attractive than his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Time magazine’s latest cover features a sketch of Harris with the words “Her Moment,” accompanying an article by senior correspondent Charlotte Alter. Harris’s likeness, illustrated by Neil Jamieson, fades into images of supporters holding campaign signs. When Trump first saw the image, he claimed, “I said, ‘is that Sophia Loren?’ I couldn’t, who might that be? ‘Is that Elizabeth Taylor?’”
He then calls Loren beautiful before warning U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick, who Trump was campaigning with, to “never call a woman beautiful because it’ll be the end of your political career.”
Trump then goes after a “Ronald Reagan speechwriter,” presumptively Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. Noonan has written about Harris’s appearance in recent weeks, saying that, “Her beauty, plus the social warmth that all who have known her over the years speak of, combines to produce: radiance.”
“She said one thing that got me,” Trump began, seemingly talking about Noonan’s columns. “She said Kamala has one big advantage, she’s a very beautiful woman. She’s a beautiful woman.” The crowd boos.
“But I say that I’m much better looking than her. Much better. Much better. I’m a better looking person than Kamala,” Trump continued, to cheers.
As the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago on Monday, Trump and his team have been trying to hone an effective defense against what has become an energized movement to elect Harris and Tim Walz, the governor from Minnesota and presumptive democratic vice presidential candidate. But Saturday’s remarks illustrate the challenge Trump’s campaign advisors face when pushing a strategy that requires Trump to focus on policy, rather than demeaning Harris’s intelligence and racial identity, or hurling other personal insults.
Trump’s comments on Saturday critiquing Harris’s attractiveness were the latest attack in what has been a misogynistic and racist campaign against the first Black and South Asian woman selected to lead a major party ticket.
During an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists in late July, Trump falsely claimed that Harris has misconstrued her multiracial identity. “She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”
Harris is “not smart enough” to do a news conference and is “barely competent,” Trump has also said. In addition, according to reporting from The New York Times, he’s allegedly called Harris a “bitch” multiple times in private.
On the eve of the DNC, a new CBS News/YouGov survey has the two candidates tied in battleground states, with Harris three points ahead nationally. Much of the divide among voters, the poll found, has to do with gender. Women respondents were more likely to see Harris as someone who “fights for people like you.” Only 29% of men said that Harris would fight “a lot” for people like them, while 43% of men answered that Donald Trump would do just that.
And, when asked if efforts to promote gender equality between men and women have gone too far, men and Republicans were far more likely to say yes, with only 10% of Republicans answering that efforts are not going far enough.
