Former President Donald J. Trump has a history of attacking female opponents and critics in personal terms.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump used his social-media website on Wednesday to amplify a crude remark about Vice President Kamala Harris that suggested Ms. Harris traded sexual favors to help her political career.
The post, by another user on Truth Social, was an image of Ms. Harris and Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s opponent in 2016. The text read: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…”
The remark was a reference to Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and a right-wing contention that Ms. Harris’s romantic relationship with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco whom she dated in the mid-1990s while he was speaker of the California State Assembly, fueled her political rise.
Mr. Trump’s repost was the second time in 10 days that the former president shared content from his personal account making sexually oriented attacks on Ms. Harris. Though he has a history of making crass insults about his opponents, the reposts signal Mr. Trump’s willingness to continue to shatter longstanding norms of political speech.
The image Mr. Trump shared on Wednesday morning was another user’s screenshot of a post on X, and it was a reply to an unrelated video clip Mr. Trump had posted on Tuesday night.
Mr. Trump reposted the image as part of a series of 30 reposts he made on Truth Social between 8:02 and 8:32 a.m. on Wednesday, including several posts
with references to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement and its slogan. Mr. Trump also reposted photos that called for the prosecution or imprisoning of top Democrats and members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The former president has vowed to direct federal prosecutors to investigate his political enemies if elected.
Previously, on Aug. 18, Mr. Trump had shared a video from the Dilley Meme Team — a group of right-wing internet content creators that makes
pro-Trump videos and memes denigrating his opponents — that parodied the Alanis Morissette song “Ironic” to attack Ms. Harris as “moronic.” In the parody song, the singer says Ms. Harris “spent her whole damn life down on her knees,” at which point a photo of Mr. Brown appears onscreen.
The Harris campaign, which has largely ignored Mr. Trump’s personal attacks, declined to comment. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly been accused of sexual misconduct and was found liable last year for sexual abuse and defamation. He has a history of attacking female opponents and critics in deeply personal terms, often describing them as mentally ill or at times expressing contempt in epithets.
Republicans close to Mr. Trump have expressed concern that he and his allies risk alienating women, Black voters and moderate swing-state voters if they continue to use racist and sexist attacks against Ms. Harris, the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to accept a major party’s presidential nomination. Mr. Trump last week acknowledged that some of his advisers have urged him to move away from personal attacks, a shift he said he did not plan to take.
Last month, Mr. Trump questioned Ms. Harris’s identity as a Black woman, suggesting at a convention of Black journalists that Ms. Harris had used her racial profile as a way to gain a political advantage.
After this article was published online, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, complained about The New York Times and said that Mr. Trump, in his reposts about Ms. Harris, “rightfully calls to question her ability to be commander in chief.” The campaign did not respond to questions about the content of these posts and whether Mr. Trump intends to continue such attacks on Ms. Harris. Ms. Leavitt added, “The Failing New York Times spends more time airing negative stories about President Trump than writing about the negative consequences of Kamala Harris’s policies as vice president.”