(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump made fun of Senator Kamala Harris’s laughter, called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy” and said one of his female interviewers was “crazed,” yet insisted at a Pennsylvania rally on Monday that suburban women would back his re-election.
In extemporaneous remarks to thousands of supporters gathered in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump questioned why Harris, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, had laughed at some of the questions she was asked during an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” broadcast Sunday.
“Did you see her last night on television with the laugh? She was laughing at a horrible question about her. She just laughed and found it so funny,” Trump said.
Pelosi, he told his audience, is “crazy as a bedbug.”
“We have a good chance of taking back the House, I tell you, because she’s crazy,” Trump added.
And he said that NBC News anchor Savannah Guthrie is “just terrible,” complaining about her questioning of him during a town-hall style event earlier this month.
“She was coming out of her chair as she was asking -- she was crazed, she was crazed,” he said. “And I did a nice job: ‘Savannah, take it easy, just relax. Take it easy, don’t let the hatred show.’”
Women voters have become a vulnerability for Trump in his bid for a second term. After supporting him by nine percentage points over Hillary Clinton in 2016, White women now back his Democratic challenger Joe Biden by six points, according to a FiveThirtyEight.com analysis of polling data published last week.
Yet Trump said Monday he’ll win suburban women, again promising to keep low-income housing out of their neighborhoods in an appeal his opponents have called racist.
“Do you like having a nice project next to your house? I don’t think so. And with it comes plenty of crime,” he said. “That’s why they keep saying, ‘We don’t know, we think he’s not doing well with suburban women.’ I think I’m doing great with suburban women.”
Speaking later Monday at a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Trump took aim again at Lesley Stahl, calling her program “crazy 60 Minutes” and saying she had been “so hostile to me” during a White House interview that was also broadcast on Sunday.
Trump often uses insulting language to describe his female political opponents, particularly Pelosi. And he has repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s first name at his rallies in a way that brings attention to its unfamiliarity, much as he emphasizes former President Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein.
To be sure, Trump on Monday didn’t limit his insults to women. He called Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and key figure in Trump’s impeachment, “the watermelon head.”
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