TOI correspondent from Washington: MAGA Republican Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris taunted and challenged each other about their respective mental acuity in a presidential race that is now boiling down to test of voter perception.
Campaigns for both sides are trashing the other’s candidate, attributing everything from drug use and alcoholism to incontinence and senility to break a deadlocked race three weeks before election day on November 5.
On Sunday both candidates addressed each other indirectly through the media, with Trump saying “it is very important that Kamala Harris pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility” and Harris suggesting Trump’s staff is hiding him from a second debate with her because they are “afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America.”
Despite refusing to release his full medical records, Trump on Monday said Kamala Harris’ “actions have led many to believe that there could be something very wrong with her,” without being specific, while claiming “she is slow and lethargic in answering even the easiest of questions.”
Harris, who is 18 years younger to Trump and clearly in better physical shape on account of a daily exercise regimen that predates her vice-presidency, in turn mocked his incoherence at hate-fueled rallies that have become more toxic by the day. “Donald Trump’s staff won’t let him do a 60 Minutes interview. Every presidential candidate for the last half century has done one. He won’t debate me again. I put out my medical records, he won’t put out his medical records. You have to ask, why is his staff doing that? It may be because they think he is unfit and unstable,” she said in a tv interview.
Both candidates are now blitzing voters with rallies, tv appearances and podcasts with interviewers who are either soft or sympathetic to them, without risking taking on hosts who are tough or who practice “gotcha” journalism. Trump, who boldly took on adversarial journalists, now complains incessantly about the mainstream media, calling it “fake news” while sticking to MAGA mouthpieces in softball interviews while his surrogates accuse Harris of doing the same on the liberal side. Harris though has scheduled on interview with Fox News on Wednesday.
On Sunday, Trump unloaded on the biopic The Apprentice, which released nationwide on Friday, calling it “A FAKE and CLASSLESS Movie written about me… a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election.” In one of the more controversial segments in the movie Trump is shown sexually assaulting his late ex-wife Ivana, a scene that has apparently enraged the former President, who called her “a kind and wonderful person” with whom he had a great relationship until she died.
“The writer of this pile of garbage, Gabe Sherman, a lowlife and talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited, knew that, but chose to ignore it. So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us,” Trump raged on social media, even as critics talked up the movie and his minions trashed it.