Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump attacked Democrats for “constant mudslinging” on Sunday before immediately turning around and dismissing her father-in-law’s swearing, racism and petty personal attacks as simply “who he’s always been.”
President-elect Donald Trump‘s daugher-in-law, married to his son Eric, appeared on Fox New’s Media Buzz, where she claimed Democrats tried to “insult” voters into supporting them in the run-up to last week’s election.
“They got to a level of just insulting people and trying to harass people into voting for them,” she said. “I think when they got to the point of constant mudslinging and not really talking about what they do for the American people, I think that’s what lost them the election.”
Host Howard Kurtz—a onetime Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast—immediately reached for his notes and shot back: “But couldn‘t Democrats say the same because during the campaign Trump called [Vice President Kamala Harris] ’dumb‘, cursed her at one point, and questioned her racial identity?”
The best answer she could apparently come up with was that Trump’s always been a mudslinging bigot.
“I think whenever you see Donald Trump say things like this, this is not out of character for him, this is who he’s always been,” she told Kurtz, before sidestepping the specific examples he mentioned to rattle off some Republican anti-migrant and pro-oil industry talking points.
Trump was alluding to the Democratic Party’s efforts to paint her father-in-law as a threat to democratic norms, with Harris and campaign surrogates making stark claims that he would rule as an authoritarian fascist.
Her father-in-law also accused Harris of being a “fascist.”
While Trump doubled down on the president-elect‘s bluster Sunday, cracks in the Democratic front began to appear as one congressman distanced himself from his party’s most combative attacks from the campaign.
“I‘ve never said that you weren’t going to have future elections, and I was never one of these people who said you’re not going to have 2026 or 2028 in one or two years,” House Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who served as deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce under former President Barack Obama, told CBS’ Face the Nation. “Donald Trump is going to be a lame duck.”
