Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said former President Trump’s continued attacks on Vice President Harris’ intelligence work “is a reflection of his racism.”
“I’ll just say this: He called the vice president an idiot at least four times today. This is a sign of his racism,” Scaramucci told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Thursday, referring to the former president’s press conference that day.
Scaramucci, who served briefly in the Trump administration, said Harris was the right choice and ignored Trump’s attacks on his general election opponent.
“She’s an extremely qualified person,” Scaramucci said. “If you look at her record and the person she is, it’s completely unreasonable for him to call her that. People need to challenge him on that and check him in on things like that.”
Speaking on Thursday afternoon from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump expressed frustration with Harris’ rise in approval ratings and voter enthusiasm for her campaign after President Biden dropped out of the race.
When asked about the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, President Trump began talking about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech from 1968.
The former president said the crowd that turned out to his speech on January 6 before the riot was larger than the crowd that attended Martin Scorsese’s civil rights speech. The House January 6 Committee estimated the size of the crowd at Trump’s speech at about 53,000 people, while an estimated 250,000 people attended King’s speech.
Trump’s comments at the press conference were the latest example of race-related comments by the former president that drew criticism during the campaign.
After Harris became the Democratic nominee, President Trump said at the National Association of Black Journalists convention that while Harris had previously campaigned on her Indian heritage, she had recently started to emphasize her black heritage because she “just happened to be black.”
Harris is of both black and South Asian descent.
Scaramucci argued that Trump is struggling to gain support, with the former president’s controversial comments threatening to further alienate black voters, among whom polls have shown Harris is making gains.
“For someone like Anthony to conflate intelligence with racism is itself an example of Anthony’s racism,” Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Chang said in a statement to The Hill.
