Trump calls Harris ‘a beautiful woman’ in familiar playbook

First, Donald Trump went after Kamala Harris’ race. Now, he’s going after her looks.

“She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. Actually, she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania. She didn’t look like Kamala,” Trump told tech mogul Elon Musk during a meandering livestream Monday, mispronouncing the vice president’s name. “But of course, she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that, right?”

He was referring to an illustration of Harris on the cover of this week’s Time Magazine, which he called a publicity “free ride.” But the comments — from which Musk quickly navigated away — fit neatly into a familiar playbook for the former president: A tendency to fixate on womens’ appearance.

“It’s demeaning. It would be equally demeaning if she wanted to discuss his physical appearance,” said Julie Roginsky, a Democratic strategist who has advocated for policies to quell workplace harassment in the aftermath of #MeToo. “That’s not what rational people are looking for in their president. They’re looking for somebody who can lead the country and address the concerns that people in this country have.”

For decades, Trump has built elements of his public persona around his proximity to — and crass rhetoric about — beautiful women. “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” he said in a 1991 interview with Esquire magazine. He used to own the Miss Universe beauty pageant, and in 2005 boasted to Howard Stern that he went backstage while the contestants were undressed. In 2013, he told a contestant on “The Celebrity Apprentice”: “It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”

And in 2016, Trump’s campaign almost sunk after audio from 2005 leaked of him bragging about groping women — comments he brushed off as “locker room talk.” More recently, Trump was found liable last year for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Earlier this year, he was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — a case that emerged over a “hush money” payment to a Stormy Daniels, a pornstar who says she slept with him.

This year, as Republicans scramble to land on a consistent line of attack against Harris, they have struggled to keep race and gender out of their criticism. GOP lawmakers on the Hill called Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, a “DEI hire” — prompting party leadership to warn them to knock it off.

Trump’s campaign and its surrogates ultimately settled on attacking Harris’ progressive record, and, to a lesser extent, her laugh. But Trump has struggled to keep her identity out of his messaging.

Behind closed doors, the former president has called Harris a “bitch,” the New York Times reported. A Trump campaign spokesperson denied the allegation to the outlet.

“It’s a continual focus on her skin color that she has. It’s a continuous focus on calling her stupid … calling her a bitch,” Roginsky said. “Some are code words, and some are just outright misogynistic terms that would never, ever, ever be applied to a man.”

In a statement to POLITICO, Trump Campaign National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the media’s negative portrayal of President Trump and his treatment of women is entirely false.” She added that Trump’s first-term economic policies “uplifted women by putting more money in our pockets, and he also made expanding access to childcare and paid family leave top priorities in his Administration, and he will do so again.”

Trump has used sexist language against other women he has campaigned against, too. “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America,” he tweeted in 2015, before deleting the post. Throughout the 2016 campaign, he repeatedly called Clinton “nasty” and suggested she was weak, which many viewed as a sexist dogwhistle.

And last month during a live interview at a Black journalists’ conference, Trump suggested Harris had previously only identified as Indian-American before she “turned Black” for political gain. In an attempt to clean up the comments on Sunday, Trump’s running-mate, Sen. JD Vance, whose wife is Indian-American, told CNN he believes Harris is “whatever she says she is” but behaves like “a chameleon.”