Critics of President Donald Trump think he lacked quite a bit of self-awareness when he said at a press conference this week that former Vice President Kamala Harris “can’t speak” and “can’t do an interview.” One professor in public humanities thinks his latest dig was an example of the president’s “appalling” strategies.
During a news conference on Thursday, Trump was asked to weigh in on Harris’ announcement the day prior that she won’t be running for governor of California in 2026. She told “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert this week that she wasn’t ready just yet to go “back in the system,” which she said she thinks is broken.
When a reporter asked Trump to share his thoughts about Harris’ political future, he responded: “Well, she can’t speak.”
“She can’t talk. She can’t do an interview,” he said as Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick could be seen laughing behind him.
He then inexplicably said that “nobody knew who Kamala was” when the then-vice president announced her candidacy for president in 2024, after former President Joe Biden announced he was dropping his reelection bid against Trump.
“Nobody knew her last name — Harris,” he said, before later adding that he thought she was a “terrible candidate” and not a “skilled politician” and that she “wasn’t a skilled person.”
Ironically, while criticizing Harris’ interviewing and speaking skills, the president invoked Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White in a tangent comparing the 2024 presidential campaign to an imagined UFC fight.
People online mocked Trump for criticizing Harris’ interviewing skills, pointing out the fact that the president gets routinely slammed for rambling and for being “incoherent” in speeches and in interviews.
“Will he ever make sense? He just rambles on like he is trying to convince himself of something but he doesn’t know what,” one Instagram user wrote in the comment section of a post that featured a video clip of Trump’s dig at Harris.
“He thinks he’s a better orator than her?” another user wrote. ”[I’ve] seen preschoolers with a bigger vocabulary than him.”
“I can’t recall a single time he’s spoken with intelligence and honor,” wrote another.
Speaking about Trump’s attack on Harris, Deepak Sarma, inaugural distinguished scholar in the public humanities at Case Western Reserve University, said that Trump has a tendency to “embrace (and share) white supremacist nationalist perspectives that deny the intelligence of women and people of color, and especially women of color.”
“He has, for example, stated similar vituperative remarks about congresswoman Jasmine Crockett,” Sarma told HuffPost. “His remarks about intelligence are directed at African Americans with greater frequency than others.”
Indeed, Trump has long been criticized for attacking women, Black people and other people of color over their intelligence, often chiding them as having “low IQ.” While speaking to reporters last month, Trump invoked Crockett when he was asked a question about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He called both congresswomen “vey low IQ” individuals.
“The rhetoric is a strategy to rile up his MAGA base and to reinforce and justify confederate era slavery,” Sarma said about Trump questioning the intelligence of Black people.
President Donald Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee, photographed with then-Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, during a presidential debate on Sept. 10, 2024, in Philadelphia.
Trump’s latest attack on Harris is a part of a “quintessential strategy” — and it’s “appalling,” Sarma said.
“It is ironic that he states that she cannot speak, talk, or do an interview, that she was a terrible candidate, and not a skilled politician,” Sarma said about Trump. “These, of course, are usually appraisals of his own capacities, and certainly not hers.”
“This is classic gaslighting, and a quintessential strategy for Trump,” they continued. “That is, he flips the script, accusing the other person of the very behavior that he exhibits, making everyone, his minions and Harris’ supporters doubt their perceptions and experiences.”
“It is equally appalling that his comments are mere ramblings, with incomplete sentences and more gaslighting,” they added. “In so doing he proves to everyone watching/listening/cringing that it is he who cannot speak, talk or do an interview, and it is he who is an unqualified politician.”
But Sarma said that it’s “essential” for people living in the U.S. to continue to call this behavior out — especially those with “public positions and profiles to speak up.”
“If they do not, then the gaslighting may take hold,” they warned.
“I am saddened that privileged people I knew who claimed to stand for democracy and human rights and so on are quiet and in hiding,” Sarma later added. “As a queer person of color, I must use my voice as an academic and a public intellectual to call out the president and his minions for their false and misleading claims.”
“If I do not, who else will?” they added.
