Donald Trump slammed Vice President Kamala Harris again Thursday afternoon, blaming her and Biden administration policies for inflation, falling household incomes and reduced middle-class wealth. With Republican allies urging his campaign to focus on issues, Trump, reading notes from a binder, repeated a series of attacks on the economy and immigration that he also leveled during a speech on Wednesday, including many false and misleading claims.
“We’re going to have a crash like the 1929 crash if she gets in,” Trump warned, despite recent economic data that has largely defied forecasts for a recession let alone much gloomier projections. While concerns have grown recently that the economy has slowed, it has continued to show signs of stability, including easing inflation and retail sales that rose 1% in July, according to Commerce Department data released Thursday. That was much better than expected.
Trump also offered a prebuttal to a forthcoming proposal from Harris to ban price gouging on groceries, warning that government price controls were a “communist” idea that would fail. He also repeated a line targeting Harris’s plans to address prices from her first day in office: “Day one really for Kamala was three-and-a-half years ago. Where has she been, and why hasn’t she done it?”
The event at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club was billed as a press conference, but the former president spent more than 45 minutes attacking Harris and railing about a range of topics before he fielded any questions from the media.
Asked about those Republicans calling for him to focus on issues, Trump said people don’t know who Harris is yet and defended his campaign approach. “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks,” he said. “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.”
He also bristled at Harris and Democrats calling him “weird” and complained at length about the legal cases against him. But he insisted that he has to run this campaign his way: “I think this is a different kind of race,” he said. “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.”
