Donald Trump has drawn ridicule and accusations of hypocrisy after accusing Kamala Harris of mistreating Mike Pence, the former vice-president who his supporters said should be hanged during the January 6 insurrection that he incited.
The Republican’s nominee’s comments came in an interview with Fox News, when he also singled out Harris’s 2018 cross-examination of Brett Kavanaugh during Senate confirmation hearings after Trump, then president, nominated him as a justice on the US supreme court.
“They say she has many deficiencies, but she’s a nasty person,” Trump told the interviewer, Mark Levin. “The way she treated Mike Pence was horrible. The way she treats people is horrible. The way she treated Justice Kavanaugh in that hearing – in the history of Congress, nobody’s been treated that way.”
Trump’s comments prompted a response from some Harris supporters, who appeared to interpret it as an example of age-related confusion and evidence that the former president, who is 78 and now the oldest presidential candidate in US history following Joe Biden’s withdrawal, is in mental decline.
“In a stunning senile moment, Donald Trump just suggested it was Kamala Harris who treated Mike Pence poorly,” Harris supporters posted on X, linking to video footage of Trump’s comments.
“Donald Trump clearly cannot remember anything. Retweet to make sure all Americans see this hypocritical and senile moment.”
In fact, Trump may have been referring to a 2020 vice-presidential debate between Harris and Pence, when the now Democratic nominee twice told her opponent “I’m speaking” when he tried to interrupt her as she articulated an argument.
However, the comments evoked social media references to Trump’s notorious treatment of Pence after his presidential election defeat to Biden, when he tried to pressure the vice-president into refusing to certify the results in Congress, as dictated by the US constitution, and then egged on a mob to attack the US Capitol while Pence was inside.
Posting on social media, David Corn, a journalist with Mother Jones, wrote: “What? Did she call him the p-word and incite the violent mob that chanted ‘Hang Mike Pence’? Because if she did, she probably should drop out of the race.”
On the morning of the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack, Trump reportedly told Pence: “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
Later, with the crowd baying for the vice-president’s blood, Trump allegedly told aides that “Mike Pence deserves it”.
Last year, Trump renewed his assault against Pence at a time when the former vice-president – who has refused to endorse his current presidential bid – was running for the Republican nomination, calling him “delusional” and “not a very good person”.
Speaking to CNN last week along with her running mate, Tim Walz, Harris – who Trump has called “nasty” several times – confirmed to interviewers Dana Bash that she and and the former president have never met.
His allusion to her treatment of Kavanaugh – one of three conservative justices Trump appointed to America’s highest court – referred to Harris’s question to him over abortion at the 2018 confirmation hearing, which took place when she was a senator.
“Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” Harris asked Kavanaugh, who parried by asking for “a more specific question”.
When Harris persisted, Kavanaugh – one of six supreme court justices to vote in favour of a landmark ruling striking down a woman’s legal right to abortion in 2022 – haltingly acknowledged that he could not think of any “right now”.
Harris has put restoring abortion rights at the centre of her presidential campaign.
Trump also suggested in the Fox News interview that he “had every right” to interfere in trying to annul the 2020 election results.
“Who ever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election, where you have every right to do it,” he said.
Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and US attorney during the Obama administration, posted on X: “There’s no right to ‘interfere’ with a presidential election. This is the banality of evil right here – Trump asserting he can override the will of the voters to claim victory in an election he lost.”
• This article was amended on 3 September 2024. A response on X to Donald Trump’s comments was posted by supporters of Kamala Harris, not by the official Harris campaign.
