In the morning, he criticized her for having her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, on hand beside her. After seeing a clip of the interview, he criticized her for rambling “incoherently.” And about half an hour before the interview was broadcast, he told a crowd in Wisconsin that the setting — a table for four at a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia — made Harris look unpresidential.
“She was sitting behind that desk, this massive desk, and she didn’t look like a leader today,” Trump said at a town hall in La Crosse, Wisconsin. “I’ll be honest. I don’t see her negotiating with President Xi of China. I don’t see her with Kim Jong Un, like we did with Kim Jong Un. So we’re going to have to see what happens.”
After the interview concluded, the usually loquacious Trump reduced his take to a single word on Truth Social, his social media platform: “BORING!!!”
Trump and his campaign have spent weeks criticizing Harris for not holding a news conference with reporters or sitting for a major interview. After she became the Democratic nominee, Trump held two news conferences aimed at taunting Harris and showing his willingness to address the media. Last week, he granted a number of interviews to mainstream media outlets.
But after Harris agreed to an interview with Dana Bash on CNN, Trump began criticizing her almost immediately. He opened Thursday with a social media post predicting “inevitable Kamala stumbles” and tried to press Bash to be “fair but tough.” He argued that Walz might give Harris an undue advantage and seeded doubts about the interview’s integrity. And after CNN aired a clip Thursday evening in which Bash asked about Harris’ shifting positions since her failed 2020 presidential bid, Trump criticized the “very weakly-phrased question” and Harris’ answer, which he said “rambled incoherently.”
While the interview was airing, Trump suggested that he was not impressed with Harris’ responses.
“I look so forward to Debating Comrade Comrade Kamala Harris and exposing her for the fraud she is,” he wrote on Truth Social, repeating “Comrade.” He added: “Harris has changed every one of her long held positions, on everything.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
