Harris challenges Trump to cognitive test

WASHINGTON: Kamala Harris said on Monday she would take a cognitive test in response to jabs from Donald Trump, and challenged the ex-president to take one too as mental fitness becomes a battle line in the White House race.

Harris has repeatedly said her 78-year-old Republican opponent, now the oldest presidential candidate in US history, is increasingly “unhinged” and unfit to lead the country again.Trump has meanwhile called the 60-year-old Democratic vice president stupid, attacking her IQ in his pitch to voters in a race that the polls suggest is effectively tied.

Harris was asked in a CBS interview segment released on Monday if she would take a cognitive test, as Trump had called for on social media.“Sure. I would challenge him to take the same one,” the vice president said.

“This is what he has resorted to. I think he is actually increasingly unstable and unhinged and has resorted to name calling because he actually has no plan for the American people,” she added.Harris´s attacks on Trump´s fitness focused last week on revelations from his longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly.

The decorated Iraq veteran told The New York Times that Trump, while president, remarked that “Hitler did some good things too” and that instead of the US military´s leadership, he “wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had.”Harris told reporters that Trump´s alleged conduct was “deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous” and she later said she agreed with Kelly´s description of Trump being a “fascist.”

Vice President Kamala Harris said that none of the vitriol at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally will support the dreams and aspirations of the American people but instead is “fanning the fuel of trying to divide our country.”

She said Trump’s event on Sunday, in which speakers hurled cruel and racist insults, “highlighted the point that I’ve been making throughout this campaign.”“He is focused and actually fixated on his grievances, on himself, and on dividing our country, and it is not in any way something that will strengthen the American family, the American worker,” the Democratic presidential nominee told reporters.