During an interview with ABC News broadcast on Friday, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, dismissed President Donald Trump’s attacks as a distraction.
World News Tonight anchor David Muir opened the discussion by pointing out that Trump has repeatedly belittled and insulted Harris.
The host told Harris that Trump “has referred to you as ‘nasty,’ a sort of ‘madwoman,’ a ‘disaster,’ the ‘meanest,’ ‘most horrible,’ ‘most disrespectful of anybody in the U.S. Senate,’” asking her to respond.
Harris argued that Trump’s insults and attacks are “designed to distract” American voters from his administration’s failures.
“That is about neglect, negligence and harm,” the California senator said.
“And incompetence,” Biden chimed in, saying that no commander-in-chief in American history has talked that way about a political opponent.
“And no president has said people coming out of fields with torches and spewing anti-Semitic bile and met by people who oppose them, and someone dies, and he says they’re good people on both sides,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s remarks about the incidents at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“No president of the United States has ever said anything like that ever,” Biden stressed.
As ABC News noted, Biden has previously slammed Trump for drawing a false equivalence between far-right protesters and those opposed to them. He has also cited the clashes between the protesters and Trump’s comments as main reasons for his third run for the presidency.
Biden and Harris’ conversation with Muir, which is their first joint interview on a major network, will be aired in its entirety on Sunday, at 8 p.m. ET.
Excerpts were broadcast less than 24 hours after the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, where both Democrats formally accepted their nominations.
As Muir pointed out, Trump has repeatedly launched vicious attacks at Harris. During a press conference last week, he appeared to give credence to a conspiracy theory about the California senator’s background.
He cited a Newsweek column penned by conservative law professor John Eastman that suggested that Harris, whose parents were immigrants from Jamaica and India, may not be eligible to serve.
As for Biden , the commander-in-chief and his allies have tried to slam him as a puppet of the progressives of the Democratic Party.
In an advertisement released earlier this week, they alleged that the Delaware moderate is being controlled by the “radical left.”
“Your job, savings and future won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” the ad said.
