Republicans go full damage-control mode after Trump calls Harris 'mentally disabled'

Senior Republican politician Lindsey Graham distanced himself from provocative remarks made by former US President Donald Trump against Vice President Kamala Harris. While addressing a charged-up gathering in Wisconsin, the Republican Presidential nominee called his Democratic counterpart “mentally impaired” and compared her actions to that of “a mentally disabled person”.

On Sunday, Graham, a Republican Senator from South Carolina, pushed back at Trump’s remarks in the speech, which the former president himself referred to as “very dark”. However, the GOP Senator tip-toed around the whole ordeal. “I just think the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country,” Graham said on CNN. “I’m not saying she’s crazy, her policies are crazy," he added.

Trump made the remarks on Saturday while he was pushing his anti-immigration rhetoric in the battleground state of Wisconsin. “Kamala is mentally impaired. If a Republican did what she did, that Republican would be impeached and removed from office, and rightfully so, for high crimes and misdemeanours,” he said.

“Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country," the former president added.

Republicans scramble to deal with Trump’s remarks

Minnesota Republican Representative Tom Emmer, who was a member of JD Vance’s debate preparation team said that the Trump campaign should stick with policy issues. “I think we should stick to the issues. “The issues are, Donald Trump fixed it once. They broke it. He’s going to fix it again. That – those are the issues,” Emmer told ABC News.

Meanwhile, Maryland’s Larry Hogan hit back at the Republicans insisting that Trump’s comments were “insulting not only to the vice-president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities." “I’ve said for years that Trump’s divisive rhetoric is something we can do without,” Hogan told CBS News.

Shortly after Trump’s remarks, his campaign decided to damage control the situation. Steven Cheung, the communications director for the Trump campaign, did not directly refer to the comments made by the former president, but insisted that Harris’s record on immigration and border security made her “wholly unfit to serve as president”.

The use of the term “mentally disabled” for Harris did not sit well with the Democrats. Democrat Illinois Governor JB Pritzker told CNN that Trump’s remarks were “name-calling”. “Whenever he says things like that, he’s talking about himself but trying to project it onto others,” the Illinois governor averred.

Eric Holder, the former Obama administration attorney general went on to claim that Trump is having a “cognitive decline”. “Trump made a great deal of the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden,” he told MSNBC. “If this is where he is now, where is he going to be three and four years from now?”

Meanwhile, Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, pointed out that many presidents had disabilities. “Trump’s comments say far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice President Harris or any person with a disability,” Town said in a statement to the Washington Post. 

With inputs from agencies.