Washington: Kamala Harris is “not competent” to be president, US President Donald Trump has said as he launched an attack on the Indian-origin senator’s credentials for the top post.
Addressing his supporters at a Republican campaign rally in New Hampshire on Friday, Trump said he would support seeing a female president in the US but suggested that his daughter and senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump would be a better candidate for such a role.
Harris, 55, was a presidential aspirant until last year before she dropped out of the race because of lack of popular support. Harris returned to political limelight after Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, picked her as his running mate in the November 3 election.
Born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, Harris is the first Indian-American and first Black woman to be picked by a major American political party for the top post.
“You know I want to see the first woman president also, but I don’t want to see a woman president get into that position the way she’d do it, and she’s not competent,” Trump said.
“She’s not competent,” he said amidst applause from his supporters, a few of whom screamed Ivanka Trump, at an election rally on Friday.
“They’re all saying, ‘we want Ivanka’. I don’t blame you,” he said responding to his supporters.
This was Trump’s first election rally after he formally accepted the nomination of the Republican Party on Thursday for the presidential election.
Trump said Harris withdrew from the Democratic Party’s presidential race before primary season kicked off as her popularity dropped down to single digit. “How about her? Sheer beauty? What a beauty though. They pick a woman who starts off…She (Harris) starts off (her presidential campaign) sort of strong. She’s one of the favourites. Within a period of a few months, she goes down, down 15, 12, 11, nine, eight, five, three, two,” he said, underlining the popularity downslide of Harris in the few months after her highly impressive campaign launch.
Hours before Trump delivered his acceptance speech from the South Lawn at the White House, Harris alleged that the president’s policies have been “a reckless disregard” for the danger a pandemic would pose to American lives. (PTI)
