SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) — Former President Donald Trump hurled insults at his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other women Wednesday — saying he had no interest in stopping his attacks even if they turn off female voters — as Hurricane Milton made landfall, lashing Florida with rain, tornadoes and tropical-storm-force winds.
“I don’t want to be nice,” Trump said at his first of two rallies of the day in the pivotal battleground state of Pennsylvania. “You know, somebody said, ‘You should be nicer. Women won’t like it.’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’”
He later refuted the idea that his rhetoric was a problem, even as polls show Trump is viewed less favorably by women than by men. “The women want to see our country come back,” he said. “They don’t care.”
Trump was campaigning even as the storm threatened to overshadow the presidential race with fears that it would cause catastrophic damage in Tampa and other parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Harris flew to Nevada for a Western campaign swing, but first attended a briefing on the storm and the federal response with President Joe Biden at the White House.
Speaking in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Trump lobbed personal insults at Harris — calling her “grossly incompetent” and “totally ill-equipped to do the job of being President of the United States” — and went after one of the hosts of ABC’s “The View,” which Harris appeared on Tuesday.
He called Sunny Hostin, who is Black and Latina, “dumber than Kamala.”
“That is one dumb woman. Sorry. I’m sorry, women, she’s a dummy,” he said of Hostin, who had asked Harris if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden over the last four years. Harris replied: “Not a thing comes to mind.”
Later, in Reading, he turned on another host of the program, calling Whoopi Goldberg, who is also Black, “demented” and saying she had a “foul mouth.”
“She was so filthy dirty, disgusting,” he said. “She was so dirty. Every word was filthy, dirty. What a loser she is.”
Trump and his campaign have seized on Harris’ response to the Biden question as it tries to paint her as nothing more than a continuation of Biden’s unpopular presidency.
In Reading, he called her answer “disqualifying” and listed a series of tragedies that happened on the Biden administration’s watch, including Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Russia’s…