Former GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy turned into a defensive and evasive mess Sunday when confronted with false remarks by his party’s presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, that his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is “mentally disabled.”
CNN Inside Politics host Manu Raju played McCarthy clips from a Trump rally in Wisconsin Saturday, where he said, “Joe Biden became mentally impaired, Kamala was born that way, she was born that way,” before going on to say “only a mentally disabled person” could have pursued the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
Raju asked McCarthy if he thought it was an effective line of attack. McCarthy at first had no answer, acknowledging it’s “100 percent true” that Trump said what he said before refusing to discuss what Trump said.
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Instead, McCarthy insisted they focus on “what was said before and what was said after” and rolled into Republican talking points about illegal immigration, flagging Immigration and Customs Enforcement data reported to Congress that said over 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide in the U.S. or abroad are living outside of the agency’s detention facilities.
Raju prompted him again, “but he’s questioning her intelligence.” McCarthy then said he “would question anybody’s intelligence” who implemented current policies, before reiterating his GOP talking points, though never going so far as to address Trump’s false claim that his opponent is “mentally disabled.”
Asked twice more about about Trump’s “mentally disabled” attack, McCarthy asked “do you think anybody would be mentally stable” for pursuing certain border policies and that he would “question your mental capacity” if you supported policies he attacked, in each case reverting back to his talking points.
“You’re okay with saying ‘mentally disabled, that’s the bottom line,” said Raju. McCarthy said “No”—as not to implicate himself in agreeing with Trump’s sordid and baseless attack—before again restating his talking points around the ICE data.
When Raju asked him about Trump and running mate JD Vance’s false claims that Haitian migrants were eating people’s pets in Ohio, McCarthy also had no answer and refused to engage, instead repeating his same talking points once more.
The American Association of People with Disabilities has slammed Trump’s remarks, telling The Washington Post they “say far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice President Harris, or any person with a disability.”
Trump has a sordid history of making hateful remarks toward disabled people. He said it would be better for people with serious disabilities to "just die," according to the tell-all memoir of his nephew Fred Trump III, and once openly mocked a disabled New York Times reporter at a rally.
