Trump accuses Harris of anti-semitism in overblown speech
US presidential candidate Donald Trump falsely accused election rival Kamala Harris of being an anti-Semite who plans to allow the murder of newborn babies in a speech meant to rally religious supporters on Friday.
Harris, who is married to a Jewish man, has gained ground on Trump in polling since she replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket just days ago.
Former Republican president Trump dedicated much of his address at a religious convention in southern Florida to assailing Harris’s record as a senator and as Biden’s vice president.
However, many of his attacks were unfounded and inflammatory.
Explaining why 59-year-old Harris had skipped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress on Wednesday to honour a prior commitment, Trump baselessly accused her of anti-Semitism
“She doesn’t like Jewish people. She doesn’t like Israel. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it’s always going to be. She’s not going to change,” he said.
This remark, coupled with his claim that Harris “is totally against the Jewish people” in North Carolina on Wednesday, marked an escalation in Trump’s incendiary rhetoric.
The hour-long Friday speech, hosted by hard-right Turning Point Action, raised questions over Harris’s previous statements on policing, immigration, and the environment.
Trump suggested baselessly that the Justice Department and FBI were “rounding up” Christians and anti-abortion activists and imprisoning them for their “religious beliefs.”
He also called Biden’s decision to exit the election campaign a “coup” by Democrats and said America was a “laughing stock.”
Trump reserved his harshest criticism for Harris, calling her a “bum” and a failed vice president who had rejected federal judges for being Catholic and would appoint “hardcore Marxists” to the Supreme Court.
He also falsely accused her of wanting to force doctors to give chemical castration drugs to children and suggested she might cheat to win in November.
“If Kamala Harris has her way, they will have a federal law for abortion, to rip the baby out of the womb in the eighth, ninth month, and even after birth — execute the baby after birth,” he claimed, in perhaps his most egregious falsehood.
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Seventy-eight-year-old Trump, now the oldest major-party nominee in history, is scrambling to reorient an election against someone two decades his junior.
Harris is tasked with rapidly assembling a campaign against an opponent who has been in near-permanent reelection mode since he became president in 2016.
Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama pledged support for Harris earlier Friday, as polls showed her closing the gap that Trump had built over Biden to make the race a statistical tie.
Democrats highlighted a Trump campaign announcement late Thursday that cast doubt on whether he will debate Harris.
“It shows that he’s afraid,” Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a major Harris campaign advocate, told MSNBC.
“It shows that he knows that if the two of them are on a stage together, it’s not going to end well for him.”
Proofreading, editing by Sakinat Musa Abubakar and Maryam Sulaiman, Editor and Journalist at Neptune Prime.
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