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Donald Trump had “no sense of who he was in front of or who he was talking to” when he made a shocking slur about his Democratic rival Kamala Harris during a recent dinner for billionaire donors in New York, according to New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman.
Longtime Trump observer Haberman and her colleagues Jonathan Swan and Shane Goldmacher reported over the weekend that the Republican presidential nominee had vented his frustrations about Harris out-fundraising him by launching into a grievance-filled rant at the exclusive gathering.
During the tirade, Trump had angrily referred to the vice president as “retarded” and also rebuked affluent Jewish Americans for not backing him, the report said.
Elaborating on the incident in conversation with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday’sThe Source, Haberman said: “What was notable about it is that he’s at this dinner with these incredibly wealthy donors or potential donors who are members of a group called the American Opportunity Alliance.
“Some of them are huge pro-Israel backers. And he starts trashing Jews who don’t back him. He uses a slur to describe Kamala Harris’s mental state. It goes on and on and on like this, and he seemed to have… It was as if he had no sense of who he was in front of or who he was or he’s talking to.
“It’s like he’s devoid of context. It’s like he’s just sort of showing up and behaving in various ways.”
Asked why she believed the former president had become less disciplined during his recent public appearances, Haberman pointed to the former president’s age.
“I mean, he’s older… I think there’s less of a filter than there used to be, which is what happens when people get older,” she said.
“I also think… he has seemed somewhat different, since the attempt on his life, in Butler, Pennsylvania, and since Joe Biden stopped being a candidate.”
In the same interview, Collins asked Haberman about Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago earlier in the day, where he frequently veered from one subject to another, notably when invoking his 2011-era “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s heritage in response to a question on tariffs.
“I mean, he’s calling it the weave, but if his opponent was doing that, would he be so generous in his description?” Collins asked.
“No,” Haberman answered. “And I think that he has challenged his rivals’ – both of them – mental acuity over and over again. Look, we are used to seeing him have a discursive speaking style, but it has gotten more rambling. It has gotten more incoherent, and it’s gotten longer.”
She continued: “That’s the other thing, is that if you look back at the speech lengths from a couple of years ago, they were much shorter when he was in office. Now, they are 75 minutes, 90 minutes. His aides have been working to try to get them down for a while.”
The duo then turned to the former president’s bizarre town hall event in Oaks, Pennsylvania, a night earlier, which descended into an impromptu dance party when Trump instructed an off-stage aide to play a random playlist of hits aftertwo audience members fainted.
The presidential candidate then spent the next half-hour bobbing and swaying to a selection of his favourite songs, from “Ave Maria” to anthems by Andrea Bocelli, James Brown, Sinead O’Connor and The Village People, inviting fresh ridicule online and from the late-night circuit.
“It was weird,” Haberman said, flatly.
“I mean, I don’t know of another word to describe last night. It was weird. And he does weird things like this. And he usually does them in private, or he does them with aides, or he does them on the Mar-a-Lago patio, when he’s DJing on an iPad. This was a rare time that people were seeing this in public.”
She added: “I think what happened was he got anxious, because people were getting sick, and it was delaying the event.”
