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Donald Trump made a shocking slur about Kamala Harris while in the midst of an angry rant to billionaire Republican donors at a recent fundraiser, according to a report.
As the 2024 race comes down to its final weeks, the former president is growing increasingly frustrated over the gap separating him and Harris in the fundraising world.
Trump vented those frustrations at a recent gathering in Manhattan with top donors including Paul Singer, Joe and Todd Ricketts, former education secretary Betsy DeVos, and other high-profile Republican donors, according to The New York Times. The paper cited several sources at the dinner who described the former president going on a grievance-filled rant wherein he complained that his supporters weren’t sufficiently supporting his third bid for the presidency.
During the rant, his personal attacks aimed at Harris grew more intense — the ex-president labeled her “retarded”, diving entirely into slur territory after previously calling her “mentally impaired” at a rally in late September.
He also once again attacked Jewish Americans who support Harris, according to the Times.
On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly lobbed borderline antisemitic comments at American Jews who support the Democratic party and his opponent, while arguing that they should have more support for Israel.
“Anybody who’s Jewish and loves being Jewish and loves Israel is a fool if they vote for a Democrat,” Trump said just last month, adding: “You should have your head examined.”
Trump has repeatedly hit Democrats for any statements supportive of humanitarian concerns about Israel’s assault on Gaza or unsupportive of the Israeli government in general. He has also used the word “Palestinian” as a slur, even dubbing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranked Jew in American politics today, “a Palestinian” after Schumer gave a speech calling for new elections in Israel.
The ex-president has also repeatedly complained about his lack of support from women, a perhaps unsurprising development given that his running mate JD Vance has not really explained why, in several media appearances during his 2021-2022 run for Senate, he aligned himself with a vein of right-wing thought which views women as largely having no real role in an ideal society beyond child-rearing.
His complaints come as the presidential election enters its final days, with Harris holding a massive fundraising lead over her opponent, one that is now likely insurmountable before Election Day itself.
The former president has trailed her in dollars raised in every month since she entered the race in mid-July, but that’s only half the story. In the most recent FEC reports, Harris’s campaign actually outraised both Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee combined. Her August fundraising sum was four times that of Trump.
But Trump isn’t going away without a fight, and polling shows the race extremely tight. The former president is leading in some swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan, part of the “Blue Wall” whose fall to Republicans in 2016 precipitated Hillary Clinton’s defeat that year. The vice president remains in the lead in national polling, by low single digits.
Republicans have been buoyed in recent weeks by the positive performance of Trump’s running mate Vance at the vice presidential debate in New York. The ex-president also appears, at least in polling, to be performing better with Black and Latino voters than Republicans have in recent cycles, a major blow to the Harris campaign’s election strategy if it bears out in November. Harris is still, however, running ahead with both demographics compared to Joe Biden’s numbers earlier this year.
Make sense of the US election with The Independent’s experts in our exclusive virtual event ‘Harris vs. Trump: who will make history?’ Reserve your space here.
