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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
Donald Trump has dismissed calls for him to rein in personal attacks on Kamala Harris, insisting in a press conference lasting more than an hour in New Jersey that he was “leading in the polls” and would defeat the vice-president by a wide margin in November.
Senior Republicans have urged the former president to tone down his rhetoric against Harris, who has opened up a lead in this year’s White House race since replacing Joe Biden as the Democratic party’s presidential candidate last month.
Trump’s primary opponents Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and his 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway have said he should spend less time attacking his opponent and focus on his proposals for immigration and the US economy.
But Trump defied those calls on Thursday, telling reporters gathered at his New Jersey golf resort that he was “very angry” at Harris and “entitled to personal attacks”.
“I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president,” Trump said after a reporter asked him about the advice from other Republicans. “She certainly attacks me personally. She actually called me weird.”
Trump went on to defend his running mate, JD Vance, saying: “He’s not weird. He was a great student at Yale. He went to Ohio State, graduated . . . at the top of his class.”
While Harris has enjoyed a wave of Democratic momentum behind her candidacy in recent weeks, Trump has claimed she staged a “coup” to replace Biden as the Democratic candidate. At an event with Black journalists, he also cast doubt on the vice-president’s race. He has recently voiced conspiracy theories about Harris faking the size of the crowds at her rallies.
“Some people say, Oh, why don’t you be nice? But they’re not nice to me. They want me to be in prison, you know,” Trump said in New Jersey, before railing against a judicial system that he insists has been “weaponised” against him in an attempt at “election interference” by the Democratic party.
“They don’t want me to be a little bit nasty. They want to put me in prison,” Trump said.
Earlier on Thursday, it was revealed that Trump’s lawyers had appealed to a Manhattan judge to delay sentencing in his criminal “hush money” trial in New York until after November’s election. In May, Trump was found guilty on 34 criminal charges, making him the first president in US history to be convicted of a crime. His sentencing is currently set for September 18.
“This is interference with a presidential election at a state level, and it’s a state that always goes Democrat,” Trump said on Thursday, in reference to the Manhattan case.
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