Support truly
independent journalism
Ever since President Joe Biden announced he would not be seeking a second term after all, Donald Trump has been left reeling by the rise and rise of Kamala Harris, who has picked up the Democratic party’s nomination and made major gains in the polls.
As a result, the former president and his running mate JD Vance have resorted to childish nicknames, from “Laughin’ Kamala” and “Kamabla” to “Tampon Tim” for Harris’s vice presidential pick Tim Walz, and attacks including a number of false claims about the vice president – both about her personal life and her political record.
The vice president and Walz meanwhile have also been landing blows on Trump and Vance, branding them “weird” and leveling claims about what a future under a second Trump administration could look like.
Here’s a look at some of the lies Trump has told about Harris so far – and her claims about him:
Trump claims Harris is Biden’s ‘border czar’
Trump has tried hard to blame the illegal immigration crisis at the US’s southern border on Harris, claiming that she is President Joe Biden’s “border czar.”
“She was a bum three weeks ago... A failed vice president in a failed administration, with millions of people crossing, and she was the border czar,” he told a Turning Point audience in Florida on July 26.
Harris was not appointed to tackle the border. Instead, she was tapped to work with Central American countries on the root causes of immigration into the US.
Meanwhile, it was Trump who urged Republicans on Capitol Hill to tank a major bipartisan border bill back in February.
Trump claims Harris ‘turned Black’
Speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago in July, Trump questioned Harris’s racial heritage and claimed she “happened to turn Black” only recently.
Vance has since called the biracial Harris, whose father is Jamaican and whose mother is Indian, a “chameleon.”
Harris has, of course, always been biracial and has proudly spoken of her heritage and the influence it has had on her life since entering public life.
Trump accuses Harris of antisemitism
When Harris first picked Walz as her running mate, Trump called in to Fox and Friends to claim it was “very insulting to Jewish people” that she did not choose the Jewish Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who had also been on her shortlist for the role.
His comments appeared to overlook the fact that Harris’s husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, is Jewish.
Trump claims Harris’s crowd was fake and AI-generated
Three days after claiming the crowd he addressed on January 6 2021 had rivaled Dr Martin Luther King’s audience when he delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech, Trump accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to fake the size of hers.
In a Truth Social post on August 11, Trump claimed that a 15,000-strong crowd that met Harris and Walz at a Detroit airport “didn’t exist” and “nobody was there.”
His contention was easily proven false by the wealth of video and photo evidence and eye-witness accounts to the contrary.
And what about Harris’s claims about Trump?
Harris refers to Project 2025 as ‘his’ agenda
Harris has referred to Project 2025 as Trump’s “agenda” should he take back the White House in November.
Speaking at a rally in Milwaukee on July 23, she said: “Donald Trump wants to take our country backward. He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class.”
The 900-page Project 2025 dossier outlining proposals for reforming the federal government to suit Republicans was drawn up by the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation – not the Trump campaign. The former president has insisted that he “knows nothing” about it and has “no idea who is behind it”, also calling it “seriously extreme” at a rally.
How plausible that denial is remains questionable, however, given that CNN has identified at least 140 former advisers to his first administration involved in its writing, including Peter Navarro, Ben Carson and Russell Vought, while its foreword is credited to Vance.
Harris claims Trump plans to cut Social Security and Medicare
At a rally in Glendale, Arizona, on August 9, Harris claimed that Trump plans to cut Social Security and Medicare.
Trump, however, has repeatedly denied having any such intention.
He told Breitbart in March: “I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare. We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.”
He repeated that position on the campaign trail in Minnesota in July.
