Donald Trump has faced ridicule and accusations of hypocrisy after he accused Kamala Harris of mistreating former Vice President Mike Pence, who his supporters said should be hanged during the January 6 riot that he incited.
The Republican nominee’s remarks were made during an interview with Fox News, and he also specifically referenced Harris’ 2018 cross-examination of Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings after then-President Trump nominated her to be a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
“Everybody says she has a lot of flaws, but she’s a nasty person,” Trump told interviewer Mark Levin. “The way she treated Mike Pence was awful. The way she treats people is awful. The way she treated Judge Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearings, no one has ever been treated like that in the history of Congress.”
Trump’s comments prompted a response from Harris’ campaign, which seemed to interpret it as an example of age-related confusion and evidence of mental decline for the former president, who, at 78, is now the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history following the withdrawal of Joe Biden.
“In a shockingly decrepit moment, Donald Trump suggested it was Kamala Harris who treated Mike Pence badly,” the campaign posted on X, linking to video footage of Trump’s remarks.
“Donald Trump clearly doesn’t remember anything. Please retweet this hypocritical, senile moment for the whole of America to see.”
Indeed, Trump may have been referring to the 2020 vice presidential debate between Harris and Pence, in which the Democratic candidate twice said “I’m speaking” after her opponent tried to interrupt her as she made her point.
But the remarks drew social media attention to Trump’s infamous treatment of Pence after his election loss to Biden, when he pressured the vice president to refuse to allow Congress to certify the election results, as required by the U.S. Constitution, and then incited a mob to storm the Capitol while Pence was inside.
Mother Jones journalist David Corn posted on social media: “What? She called him the P-word and incited a mob chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence’? If so, she should probably drop out of the race.”
On the morning of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Trump reportedly told Pence: “You’re either going to go down in history as a patriot or you’re going to go down in history as a coward.”
Afterwards, as the crowd cried out for the vice president’s blood, Trump reportedly told an aide, “Mike Pence deserves it.”
Last year, Trump renewed his attacks on former Vice President Pence, who declined to run for president, when he was running for the Republican nomination, calling him “delusional” and “not a very nice person.”
Harris, who has been called “mean” by Trump on multiple occasions, spoke to CNN last week alongside running mate Tim Walz and admitted to interviewer Dana Bash that she and Trump have never met.
The reference was to Harris’s response to Kavanaugh, one of three conservative judges appointed by President Trump to the US Supreme Court, when she questioned him about abortion during his 2018 confirmation hearing as a senator.
“Can you think of any law that gives the government the power to make decisions about men’s bodies?” Harris asked, to which Kavanaugh avoided answering, asking for “more specific questions.”
As Harris pressed on, Kavanaugh, one of six Supreme Court justices who voted in favor of the landmark decision that will strike down women’s legal right to abortion in 2022, hesitantly acknowledged that he couldn’t think of anything “right now.”
Harris has made restoring abortion rights a central focus of her presidential campaign.
Trump also suggested in an interview with Fox News that he had “every right” to intervene to try to invalidate the results of the 2020 election.
“Have you ever heard of someone being prosecuted for interfering in a presidential election? You have a right to do that,” he said.
Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and U.S. attorney during the Obama administration, posted on X: “There is no right to ‘interfere’ in a presidential election. This is a cliche of evil. Trump is claiming he can ignore the will of the voters to claim victory in an election he lost.”