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Trump welcomes rallygoer’s insult of Harris as a prostitute

“She worked on a corner!” a member of the crowd shouted out. Trump let out a short laugh. “This place is amazing,” he said.

Former president Donald Trump spoke during a campaign event in the swing state of North Carolina. (Cornell Watson for The Washington Post)

By Hannah Knowles and Marianne LeVine
November 3, 2024 at 12:51 a.m. EDT

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Donald Trump laughed Saturday at a rallygoer’s crude comment insulting Vice President Kamala Harris as a prostitute and declared, “This place is amazing” — his latest embrace of sexist jabs at his female opponent.

It all started with Trump riffing on an unsubstantiated claim that Harris never worked at McDonald’s. The vice president worked at McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, California, in the summer of 1983, according to her campaign.

“It’s terrible when Kamala says that she worked at McDonald’s,” Trump said. He added: ]“It’s so simple, she’s a liar, a real liar, not a good liar, but she’s a significant liar, and when you lie about something so simple. So she never worked there —”

“She worked on a corner!” a member of the crowd shouted out.

Trump let out a short laugh, briefly paused and pointed his finger to the crowd.

“This place is amazing,” he said to laughs and cheers. “Just remember it’s other people saying it, it’s not me.”

Asked for comment, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not directly address the exchange.

“President Trump loves the state of North Carolina and thinks the state and its people are amazing,” Cheung wrote in a statement, touting Trump’s many events there.

Harris’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The interaction stood in contrast to other moments where politicians have pushed back on their supporters’ offensive language. Former Republican presidential nominee John McCain, for instance, famously rebuked a town hall attendee who inaccurately called opponent Barack Obama an “Arab” he couldn’t trust.

Saturday’s episode also reflected how Trump’s supporters have attacked Harris in even more offensive language than he uses and how the former president has a record of responding to such comments with approval or amusement.

Trump has shared a vulgar joke about Harris that suggested sex advanced her career; said she would be “like a play toy” for world leaders; and belittled her intelligence. Some of his fans have gone further.

Sexist and sexual attacks on Harris are a fixture at Trump rallies, where vendors sometimes roam the long lines hawking T-shirts that call Harris a “ho.” The most common iteration misspells the term for a promiscuous woman: “Say No to the Hoe.”

Trump has not publicly used that term for Harris. A warm-up speaker at his recent Madison Square Garden rally used a metaphor that cast Harris as a prostitute, saying Harris and “her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”

The Trump campaign has previously declined to denounce supporters’ use of “ho” to describe Harris, suggesting Democrats’ rhetoric against Trump is the problem.

Trump supporters often say the “ho” insult stems from Harris’s romantic relationship in the 1990s with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco. It ended before Harris ran for her first elective office. Attendees at Trump’s rallies sometimes claim, falsely, that Brown paid Harris for sex or that the two had an affair; Brown was separated from his wife.

Brown wrote about the relationship in the San Francisco Chronicle in a 2019 op-ed titled “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?” He said he may have aided Harris’s early career but added that he helped many other California politicians.

Saturday night’s exchange echoed another moment from a Trump rally last month in Harris’s home state of California. As Trump lamented “the things she did” there, an audience member shouted something.

“He says Willie Brown,” Trump said, laughing and triggering 15 seconds of cheering.

“Who said that? Who’s the guy? Stand up,” Trump said.

He suggested he was not responsible for the comment: “I didn’t say it. Remember that — he said it.”

The gender gap remains one of the defining dynamics of this campaign cycle. A Washington Post average of October national polls shows Harris leading by an average of 11 points among women while Trump leads by 10 points among men — a 21-point gap in the vote margin.

It’s not unusual for Trump to wink, often not so subtly, at degrading insults about his political rivals. Immediately after his McDonald’s riff on Saturday night, Trump mused: “You’re not allowed to use the word fat, if you use the word fat it’s the end of your political career.” He proceeded to tell a story about a man who stood up at an event in New Hampshire and said “Chris Christie is a fat pig.”

“I said ‘sir please sit down, Chris Christie is not a fat pig,’” Trump said. “So the press couldn’t write about it. Because there was nothing to write, I was helping Chris Christie ha ha.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/03/trump-insult-worked-corner-rally-harris/