Washington: US President Donald Trump said he is surprised that his Democratic Party challenger for the presidential elections Joe Biden has named Indian-origin Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate despite knowing how “nasty” and “disrespectful” she has been towards him.
Biden on Tuesday named Harris as his vice-presidential running mate, making history by selecting the first black woman to compete on a major party’s presidential ticket.
Harris, 55, whose father is an African from Jamaica and mother an Indian, is currently the US Senator from California.
“We’ll see how she works out. She did very, very poorly in the primaries as you know. She was expected to do well. She ended up at right around two per cent,” Trump told reporters at a White House news conference.
“She had a lot of things happening and so I was a little surprised that he (Biden) picked her. I’ve been watching her for a long time, and I was a little surprised,” Trump said, offering his first reaction to Biden’s pick of Harris.
Harris had launched her presidential campaign in January 2019. Her campaign could not take off and by the end of the year, she withdrew from the race.
Harris is the first person of colour to be selected as a vice presidential candidate and also only the fourth woman and first-ever African American and Indian American to be running for the second highest political position in the country.
Responding to questions, Trump told reporters that Harris has been nasty to Biden.
“As far as Kamala is concerned, she’s a big tax raiser. She’s a big slasher of funds for our military. And she’s got a lot of difficult things that she’s going to have to explain. Plus she was very, very nasty — one of the reasons it surprised me — she was probably nastier than even Pocahontas (Senator Elizabeth Warren) to Joe Biden. She was very disrespectful to Joe Biden,” Trump said, referring to the Democratic Party debates.
“It’s hard to pick somebody that’s disrespectful. When she said (those) things during the debates — the Democrat Primary debates — that were horrible about sleepy Joe. I would think that he wouldn’t have picked (her),” Trump said.
