Trump says Harris is 'mentally impaired' and should be disqualified

WASHINGTON: The US Presidential elections took an ugly and ominous turn this weekend with MAGA Supremo Donald Trump calling Democratic candidate Kamala Harris "mentally impaired" and demanding she be disqualified for letting in foreign criminals into the country to win the elections.
Trump made a series of wild and unsubstantiated charges at a rally in Wisconsin and a college football game he attended in Alabama, doubling down on his racist rhetoric and taking US political discourse into unchartered territory.
'Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala 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 told a fanboy interviewer who egged him on the sidelines of a game where spectators gave him a raucous reception when he was shown on the jumbotron.
The Harris campaign in turn trolled him with an ad that called him a "loser" for running away from a second debate after he self-destructed in the first, which he maintains he won. Bad weather reportedly thwarted an airplane banner that was to carry the message "Trump’s Punting on 2nd Debate" over one of the biggest college football games involving Georgia and Alabama that attracted over 100,000 spectators.
Trump has previously called Harris "crazy," "nuts" and "dumb as a rock," and endorsed allegations that she is successful only because she slept her way to the top. He has claimed that the Jamaican-Indian origin vice president conveniently adopted a black heritage recently for electoral gains.
But his latest line of attack suggesting that she should not be allowed to run on grounds of mental disability, coming amid growing legal challenges to the poll process in places where Democrats are expected to win, marks sinister turn in the most fractious US election in modern history.
Trump's ramped up attack on Harris, including personal denigration, was triggered by new data purportedly provided by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official to a Republican lawmaker, revealing more than 650,000 non-citizens with criminal history, including more than 13,000 individuals accused or convicted of homicide, are currently in the US. The data did not say when or from how far back the alleged criminals came in or how the purported criminality was determined.
“As of July 21, 2024, there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket —13,099 criminally convicted MURDERS. Americans deserve to be SAFE in our own communities," Congressman Tony Gonzales, who represents a border district in Texas, tweeted.

But Trump and his MAGA cohorts are going with the narrative that the Biden-Harris administration is willfully bringing in criminals from across the world to "destroy America" and win the elections despite little evidence that illegal immigrants, much less criminals, are being registered to vote.
Trump himself has become more graphic in the language he is using, ostensibly to put fear into American voters. "They will walk into your kitchen, they'll cut your throat,...they will rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill," he foamed.
The ICE data was made public just before Harris went to visit the border in Arizona to make the case that having staunched the migrant crossing from Mexico, she will get tougher on the border issue, and it is Trump who is sabotaging it for electoral gains. She has repeatedly said Trump wants to run on a problem rather than work toward a solution, pointing to the former President spiking immigration and border legislation proposed by lawmakers from the Republican Party.
Trump has denied killing the legislation even though Republican lawmakers have publicly confirmed this and Trump himself boasted having done so. His effort to pin the illegal immigration issue on Harris, demonize immigrants, otherize her as an outsider, and try and disqualify her is also transparent.
“Nobody who has allowed this to happen to our Country is fit to be President of the United States! Bad timing for her to show up to the Border today, after not going for four years. Why didn’t she release these numbers earlier?” Trump asked, as the MAGA echo-chamber went into overdrive with the new data. Rightwing commentators accused the liberal media of downplaying the data, amid questions from the latter about its authenticity and the timing of the release, which appeared to indicate a political divide even among immigration officials.