Harris and Trump Trade Attacks Over Gender, and Mark Cuban Enters the Fray

Harris and Trump Campaigns Rapidly Trade Attacks Over Gender

Kamala Harris seized on Donald Trump’s latest comments about women, and the Trump team lashed out over a remark about his female allies by Mark Cuban, a top Harris supporter.

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By Katie RogersMichael GoldKellen Browning and Reid J. Epstein

Katie Rogers and Reid J. Epstein reported from Washington, Michael Gold from Albuquerque, N.M., and Kellen Browning from Phoenix.

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Vice President Kamala Harris attacked former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday for claiming at a rally that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not.”

In response, the Trump campaign lashed out at the billionaire Mark Cuban, a top Harris surrogate, for insulting the intelligence of women close to the former president.

It was another hairpin turn that took the presidential race from literal trash talk to gender issues in its closing stage, with both candidates trying to inflict political wounds that will take days to heal as Americans cast their votes.

Ms. Harris, speaking from Wisconsin on Thursday morning before leaving for campaign stops in the West, said that Mr. Trump’s comments, made the evening earlier at a rally near Green Bay, constituted a “very offensive” message to all Americans. Within minutes, the Trump campaign fired back: “Why does Kamala Harris take issue with President Trump wanting to protect women, men, and children from migrant crime and foreign adversaries?” Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump had rolled into a Green Bay-area rally sitting in the passenger seat of a garbage truck, trying to tie Ms. Harris to comments made this week by President Biden, who appeared to call the Republican nominee’s supporters “garbage.” The president made the remark while criticizing a comic at Madison Square Garden who, days earlier at a Trump rally, had disparaged Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”

But after Mr. Trump told the crowd that his advisers had urged him to stop using a well-worn rally line about his desire to protect women, saying they had called it “inappropriate,” the Harris campaign saw an opportunity to throw the focus of a race divided along gender lines squarely back onto her opponent.

“This is the same man who said women should be punished for their choices,” Ms. Harris said at her rally in Phoenix on Thursday afternoon, after repeating Mr. Trump’s comment to a chorus of boos from the crowd, which the campaign said numbered over 7,000. “He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly. But we trust women.”

She urged Arizonans to vote for a proposition that would enshrine access to abortion until fetal viability — about 24 weeks — in the state’s Constitution, a change from the state’s current 15-week ban on the procedure.

“To protect your right to make your own health care decisions, I would recommend you vote ‘yes’ on Proposition 139,” Ms. Harris said.

As Election Day nears, Ms. Harris has tried to appeal to moderate Republican and independent women, particularly in the suburbs, by talking about her support for reproductive rights and casting Mr. Trump as a threat to them.

She made her case in back-to-back rallies on Thursday. After Phoenix, she was set to campaign in Reno, Nev., and in Las Vegas, where she is to appear with the singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who is of Puerto Rican descent. Ms. Lopez is among a flood of Hispanic celebrities who signed on to help the Harris campaign in the days after Mr. Trump’s rally in New York. (A video endorsement of Ms. Harris from the basketball star LeBron James on Thursday highlighted another racist remark made there by the same comic who disparaged Puerto Rico, this one directed at a Black rallygoer.)

Ms. Harris, at her rally in Phoenix, offered more pointed criticism of Mr. Trump’s treatment of immigrants by seeking to remind voters of the deeply unpopular policy he carried out as president that separated children from their parents if a family was caught crossing the southern border illegally.

“If elected, you can be sure he will bring back family separation policies, only on a much greater scale than last time,” she said, later making the same claim on social media.

On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump visited New Mexico, a notable detour from the top battleground states to one that rejected him by more than 10 percentage points four years ago. He was then holding events near Las Vegas and Phoenix, major cities in crucial states.

Mr. Trump’s choice to hold a rally at the airport in Albuquerque raised eyebrows from political observers, given that New Mexico has not voted for a Republican since 2004. As he has tried to project confidence in his national appeal, he has made occasional trips to blue states.

He offered two explanations from the stage: a false claim about New Mexico’s elections, and an argument that the stop was “good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community.”

He then made a number of broad observations about Hispanic voters and polled the crowd on whether he should use the term “Hispanic” or “Latino” to refer to them.

“I love Hispanics, and they’re hard workers, and, boy are they entrepreneurial, and they’re great people, and they are warm,” he said during a meandering 90-minute speech. “Sometimes they’re too warm, if you want to know the truth.”

The Trump campaign, eager to cut into Ms. Harris’s polling advantage with women, saw an opportunity in the comments from Mr. Cuban, who has been campaigning for Ms. Harris. Appearing on “The View,” he argued that Mr. Trump was never surrounded by “strong, intelligent women.”

Susie Wiles, effectively one of Mr. Trump’s two co-campaign managers, responded with a rare public statement. Mr. Cuban, she wrote on X, “needs help identifying the strong and intelligent women surrounding Pres. Trump. Well, here we are!”

A Trump adviser, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said that the campaign viewed Mr. Cuban’s remark as a condescending statement in the vein of Mr. Biden’s “garbage” remark, and that Ms. Wiles’s post was part of a coordinated effort to amplify it.

Hours later, Mr. Trump himself weighed in.

Arguing that Mr. Cuban “thinks he’s ‘hot stuff’ but he’s absolutely nothing,” the former president wrote on X that the billionaire was “very wrong, I surround myself with the strongest of women - With the understanding that ALL women are great, whether strong or not strong.”

Mr. Cuban tried to qualify his comments.

“I’m not saying that Republican women who vote for him aren’t smart and intelligent and strong. Many are,” he said after a small-business event in Atlanta, mentioning Kellyanne Conway and Elaine Chao, who served in the Trump administration. But he argued that such Republican women rarely played starring roles at the former president’s campaign events. “You don’t see him on the trail side by side with anybody. So they can jump on it all they want.”

In Ms. Harris’s remarks with reporters, she expanded her criticism of Mr. Trump beyond gender and also warned that he would again try to eliminate the Affordable Care Act if given a second term. As president, he tried and failed to repeal the health care law, which has since become popular with a majority of Americans.

Ms. Harris nodded to remarks this week by Speaker Mike Johnson, an ally of Mr. Trump’s, in which he said Republicans would pursue “massive reform” of the act if the former president won. Mr. Johnson, the she said, would provide “further validation” of Mr. Trump’s efforts.

“Health care for all Americans is on the line in this election,” she said.

On Thursday, Mr. Johnson sought to clarify his comments, which included an apparent agreement with a voter who asked if there would be “no Obamacare” if Mr. Trump won and Republicans controlled Congress. “No Obamacare,” Mr. Johnson replied.

His tone was different in interviews on Thursday.

“They took a clip out of context and said that I said that we were promising to repeal Obamacare,” Mr. Johnson said during an appearance on the Fox Business Network. “That’s just not what I said, it’s actually the opposite of that.”

The former president hit back at Ms. Harris on his social media site.

“Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing. She also said I want to end Social Security. Likewise, never mentioned it, or thought of it.”

As president, Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to overturn the Affordable Care Act. In his current campaign, he has expressed interest in replacing the act and supporting cuts to entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare.

But Ms. Harris spent the bulk of her time on Thursday highlighting Mr. Trump’s remarks about keeping women safe even against their will, an approach he cast as paternal. Women in the crowd at his rally screamed their approval, but Democrats roundly criticized the comments. In her remarks to reporters, Ms. Harris said the former president’s statement was “offensive to everybody, by the way.”

Her campaign also sought to highlight comments about Roe v. Wade made by Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, including Mr. Vance’s claim that supporters of abortion rights were “trying to celebrate” the procedure. (“I think there’s very few people that are celebrating, though,” Mr. Rogan replied.)

The remarks about protecting women have threatened to further upend Mr. Trumps’s closing message to American voters. The comments evoked his past use of or misogynistic words toward women, a civil court case that found him liable for sexual abuse and the accounts of roughly two dozen women who have said he had abused or attacked them.

His first presidential race was rocked in October 2016, when leaked audio from a past appearance on “Access Hollywood” caught him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals, remarks he later dismissed as “locker room banter.” In civil proceedings, Mr. Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Mr. Trump is appealing the case.

Maya King contributed reporting from Atlanta, Nicholas Nehamas from Las Vegas and Maggie Haberman from New York.