THE WASHINGTON POST: Donald Trump labels Kamala Harris lazy in bid to sway Latino voters

Republican nominee Donald Trump used a racist stereotype to attack Vice-President Kamala Harris and described his desire to exercise “extreme power” as president during an event Tuesday (US time) that was billed as a summit to highlight his support among Latinos.

“I was going to hit her really hard on the trail today, but now I don’t have to, because she’s off,” Trump said of Harris, who is spending the day in Washington between campaign travel on the other days of the week. “You know why? She’s lazy as hell, and she’s got that reputation.”

Harris recorded multiple media interviews on Tuesday after campaigning in three battleground states on Monday.

Trump’s coded language tries to undermine Harris’s qualifications based on her race and gender, said Rachel Noerdlinger, a Democratic communications strategist and senior adviser to Win With Black Women.

“Trump is reviving the old trope that Black women are unqualified for jobs historically held by White men,” she said. “Not having a campaign event while you’re in the middle of also governing isn’t ‘lazy’ - making almost 300 trips to the golf course as president is.”

Trump has bristled at being called lazy himself, particularly by Harris’s campaign as he reduced campaigning over the summer. Trump has picked up his travel schedule this month with multiple events a day, though he cancelled a virtual town hall on Tuesday.

He spoke Tuesday at a roundtable with Latino leaders at his golf resort here in Florida before a few hundred Hispanic supporters. Elsewhere in his remarks, Trump brushed back at Harris’s criticism for his opposition to bipartisan legislation to increase border security funding and staffing. Trump argued that the bill was unnecessary, describing it as “phony” and “stupid,” because he could shut down the border by executive fiat.

“As president, you have tremendous - it’s called extreme power. You have extreme power,” he said. “You can, just by the fact, you say, ‘Close the border,’ and the border’s closed. That’s it. Very, very simple. You don’t need all of this nonsense that they talk about.”

The bipartisan bill, which Harris has said she would push to enact if elected, failed this year after Trump urged Republican senators to oppose the bill. After that, the Biden administration imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum via executive action that led to a significant drop in the number of illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border.

Trump has previously said he wants to govern as a “dictator” on his first day in office to close the border and expand drilling for oil. He has since said he was joking, but the comments raised alarm about his authoritarian tendencies, his affection for autocrats, and the disregard for checks and balances he showed in his first term and has said he would intensify in a second.

“A second Trump term poses too big a risk for America to take,” Matt Corridoni, a Harris spokesperson, said in a statement. “An unhinged and unstable Donald Trump wants to purge the government of public servants to replace them with loyalists who will help him pursue unchecked ‘extreme power’ that he could use against his fellow Americans, whom he calls ‘the enemy from within.’”

Trump has repeatedly used the phrase “enemy from within” to describe his political opponents, sometimes specifying Democrats such as California Reps. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, and Adam Schiff, a Senate candidate. On Tuesday, Trump suggested the term could apply to whomever leaked Israeli battle plans this month, an incident the FBI said it is investigating.

The former president also described Harris as lazy in August during a visit to the US-Mexico border, as he attacked her assignment to address the underlying causes of immigration through diplomacy with Central American countries.

“She didn’t want to do the work because she’s lazy,” he said at the time.

Spokesman Steven Cheung said Tuesday that Trump’s insult was not based on race or gender. “She is exhausted and lazy compared to the robust schedule President Trump has maintained, and has nothing to do with her race or gender,” Cheung said.

Trump reprised his attacks on Harris during a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Tuesday night (local time), including over her identity. He falsely accused her of spending the day “sleeping” and taking another day off on Wednesday, when she is scheduled to do a town hall with CNN. The town hall replaced the debate that Trump declined to participate in.

“This woman is a radical left lunatic who has no right even running,” he said in Greensboro. “She’s running because they want to be politically correct.”

Tuesday morning’s event was billed as a Latino summit, where Trump would take questions from Latino leaders. It quickly devolved into a roast of Harris, with speakers joining Trump in his attacks on the vice president.

Bob Unanue, CEO of Goya Foods, railed against Harris, saying she should “look in the mirror” to see the “root cause” of the country’s immigration problems. He repeatedly mispronounced her name as Que Mala, which in Spanish means “so bad.” Many in the crowd laughed and joined him in calling her “Que mala Kamala.”

Trump bashed solar farms in the desert as a “terrible” threat to rabbits, saying they are “all steel and glass and wires. It looks like hell. And you see rabbits get caught in it.”

He falsely said electric-car charging stations would cost $US9 trillion.

He again distorted official Homeland Security statistics on undocumented immigrants with homicide convictions, falsely claiming that the Biden administration “released” them when, in reality, the government numbers Trump is citing span decades and include people who are serving time in state and federal prisons.

He continued to lean on his anti-transgender message, going on a riff about men playing in women’s sports and vowing to end that on his first day in office. Of Democrats, he falsely claimed that “all they think about is transgender operations.”

The event wrapped up with a prayer being led for Trump. Speakers at the roundtable congregated around him as two evangelical pastors prayed for him to be protected and win the November election.

“Today, Lord, we lift up the man that we believe you put your hand upon to help restore America and bring America back to the place that honors you,” Mauricio Peña, one of the pastors, said as attendees took videos and extended their hand toward Trump in prayer.