Harris, Trump trade insults over who is fit to serve

The question of each presidential candidate’s fitness to serve has become a breeding ground for insults between Vice President Harris and former President Trump, who are trying to paint each other as incapable of being the next commander in chief.

Trump, 78, has begun questioning Harris, 59, over her cognitive abilities — the very matter that was at the crux of President Biden dropping out of the race after pressure from his own party.

Harris has laid into Trump, questioning his stability and pouncing on him after a display at a town hall where he stood and let music play for nearly 40 minutes. Other political observers have noted Trump sounds “more incoherent” at rallies and appearances in which he meanders from topic to topic.

“I’m gonna say what I’ve said publicly, and will say many times, based on my observations and I think the observations of many: Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and, as has been said by the people who have worked closely with him, even when he was president, he’s unfit to be president of the United States,” Harris said Wednesday.

Trump, meanwhile, has tried to cast Harris as having similar issues as Biden did before he dropped out; the president faced a cascade of doubts, based on his age, about his ability to serve a second term.

“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,” Trump said at a Wisconsin rally.

Harris attempted to put pressure on her political rival this past week by releasing her medical report, which determined she was in “excellent health.”

She and her campaign have for days hammered on the same line of attack, insisting voters deserve more information about the former president’s health.

“Donald Trump said that he would release … his medical records. … He’s been forgetting things,” Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), said at a rally Monday. “He’s confused; he’s a nearly 80-year-old man. He’s ranting and rambling until people get bored and leave his rallies.”

The former president has responded by calling on Harris to take a cognitive test, citing what he called “lethargic” interview answers, and suggested in a Truth Social post that Harris’s seasonal allergies, which were outlined in her medical report, are a serious issue. 

Trump has not released a medical report this year other than updates from Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), a former White House physician, detailing treatment for Trump’s ear wound from an assassination attempt in July. Trump released a letter from his personal physician in November 2023, but it was far less detailed than his medical updates while in the White House.

Democrats argued that the Harris campaign highlighting Trump’s age, despite Biden’s age being in the spotlight just months ago and the vice president defending him at the time, is a fair strategy in the home stretch of the campaign.

“I think anything that gets under [Trump’s] skin is good. Anything that distracts him and makes him go to his base tendencies, which is to be mean-spirited and harsh and turns people off, is good,” said Al Mottur, Democratic strategist and bundler at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. 

“He’s not who he was. He doesn’t have the same fastball he used to have, and so I’m all for it. It also highlights the fact that he is the oldest person ever to run for president in American history as the nominee of a political party. And why not make people think about that?” he added.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been quick to highlight Harris’s defense of Biden, when other top Democratic leaders led a pressure campaign against him in July for him to drop out of the race due to concerns about his health and fitness for office.

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said in a statement that Harris has “zero credibility when it comes to talking about people’s health,” accusing the vice president of misleading the public about Biden’s physical and mental state “when everyone could clearly see that he was practically a corpse.”

“Kamala only wants to discuss this topic to deflect from her terrible poll numbers, which are getting worse by the day,” Leavitt said. “As for President Trump’s health, just take a look at his campaign schedule. He is crisscrossing the country doing multiple events, town halls, interviews, and rallies every day, with massive crowds that Kamala could only dream about.”

Democrats have for months been frustrated that Trump’s mental fitness and ability to serve a full term in the White House has not gotten the same amount of scrutiny as Biden’s acuity did when he was in the race.

The Harris campaign and its allies have in recent weeks more aggressively highlighted instances of Trump’s verbal slips at his rallies to question if he’s up to the job. 

This week alone, the campaign has cut clips of Trump telling supporters to vote on “Jan. 5,” butchering the pronunciation of “Arizonans” and answering a question about breaking up Google by talking about Virginia voting laws.

Political watchers question, though, if highlighting such moments from Trump will sway any of his supporters away toward Harris.

Michael LaRosa, traveling press secretary to first lady Jill Biden on the 2020 campaign, called the attempts by both campaigns to put fitness in the spotlight “a necessary feeding of the beast” but argued it will have little impact on changing voters’ minds. 

“It’s a job well done on both sides, but none of it is new and does little to change minds or alter impressions that voters already have at this point,” said LaRosa, who also served as a special assistant to the president. “It’s fairly standard operating procedure to turn up the volume on the noise machine and add to the swirl of volleys back and forth between two candidates in the final weeks and days.”