‘Increasingly shocking and harsh’: Experts say Trump is ratcheting up ‘dark' rhetoric​

Former President Donald Trump is heading into the final weeks of the 2024 campaign using “increasingly shocking and harsh rhetoric” about his Democratic opponent as part of his campaign strategy to portray the country as “destroyed,” according to an ABC News analysis.

The analysis was driven by Trump’s most recent attacks of Vice President Kamala Harris as “mentally impaired” and “disabled,” and notes that Trump himself acknowledged to rallygoers in Pennsylvania on Sunday, “This is a dark speech.”

“Trump is no stranger to inflammatory rhetoric. A hallmark of his 2016 bid for the White House was to cast immigrants as rapists and drug traffickers,” Alexandra Hutzler argued in the ABC News analysis published Monday. But, she writes, Trump’s most recent attacks on Harris as “mentally impaired” over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the southern border is the former president's “harshest attack on Harris yet this cycle.”

Politico White House correspondent and MSNBC contributor Eugene Daniels said Monday night that Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Harris with 36 days until Election Day is “because she is a Black woman.”

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“He has a hard time running against Vice President Harris because she is a black woman,” Daniels said on MSNBC's “Inside with Jen Psaki.” He went on to tell the show’s panel that as president, he watched as Trump “held his most angry self for Black women.”

“If they asked him a question, he would have the worst things to say about them. You are seeing that,” Daniels said. “He is better at being in the muck and he likes it down there. He’s having a hard time running against someone who's not getting in the muck with him."

“The man is losing it and lashing out,” Psaki added.

“This is insane stuff, and he is not well,” conservative lawyer George Conway said during the discussion about Trump’s increased rhetoric. Conway said he believes Trump’s shift came after the presidential debate when Harris “mopped the floor with him.”

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