Former US president Donald Trump has called the Democratic ticket of vice-president Kamala Harris and Tim Walz “communist” and suggested he is willing to debate Ms Harris anywhere, despite having pulled out of a scheduled debate.
He also hit out at Mr Walz over an interaction they had in April 2020, one which at the time led to the then president tweeting: “Received a very nice call from @GovTimWalz of Minnesota. We are working closely on getting him all he needs, and fast. Good things happening!”
In an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday, Mr Trump described Mr Walz as calling him for help because he was scared of protesters outside his home, though reporting at the time described Mr Walz asking Mr Trump to help Minnesota get more personal protective equipment and increase its Covid testing capacity so that he could let businesses reopen in the early days of the pandemic.
Representatives for Mr Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Claire Lancaster, a spokeswoman for Mr Walz, said the subject of that call was PPE and testing capacity, not the protests.
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Beyond his claims about the 2020 interaction with Mr Walz, Mr Trump stuck mainly to the arguments that other Republicans have advanced since Ms Harris announced her running mate in the US election on Tuesday: that Mr Walz is too liberal and that Ms Harris rejected Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro because he is Jewish.
In the interview, on Fox & Friends, Mr Trump repeated an attack that he has made many times before and that has been criticised as anti-Semitic, saying any Jewish person who voted for Democrats “should have their head examined”.
“He’s probably about the same as Bernie Sanders,” he said of Mr Walz’s ideology. “He’s probably more so than Bernie Sanders. She is more so than Bernie Sanders. That’s got to be your guy, Bernie Sanders, and that’s not a great guy. But there has never been a ticket like this. This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner. We want no security. We want no anything. He’s heavy into transgender.”
He then suggested that he planned to debate Ms Harris, a few days after he wrote in a social media post that he would drop out of a scheduled debate on ABC News and suggested one on Fox News instead.
“I don’t know how she debates. I heard she’s sort of a nasty person,” he said, repeating an insult that he has used against several women, including Hillary Clinton, former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott. “But not a good debater. But we’ll see, because we’ll be debating her, I guess, in the pretty near future. It’s going to be announced fairly soon.”
“I’d love to see it on Fox, but, you know, it takes two to tango,” he added after referring to ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos as “Slopadopoulos”. “Look, she doesn’t want to debate.”
Ms Harris had agreed to the ABC News debate and criticised Mr Trump for cancelling it last week. “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage,” she said at a rally. “Because as the saying goes, ‘If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.’”
The Fox News hosts also asked Mr Trump to respond to a criticism Mr Walz made at his and Ms Harris’s rally on Tuesday night. Mr Trump “never sat at that kitchen table like the one I grew up at, wondering how we were going to pay the bills,” Mr Walz said. “He sat at his country club in Mar-a-Lago wondering how he could cut taxes for his rich friends.”
Mr Trump said he had built businesses and created jobs, claimed that his administration was “the most successful administration from the economy standpoint there ever was”, and pointed to inflation under President Joe Biden.
“I was not always sitting at Mar-a-Lago, either,” he added. “I was sitting at lots of other places.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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