President Trump on Saturday dismissed the hype surrounding Sen. Kamala D. Harris’ debate performance, saying “she was given too much credit.”
Ms. Harris was the talk of Washington after eviscerating former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Thursday during the first 2020 Democratic presidential primary debate.
She exposed Mr. Biden’s past opposition to some school busing — a major tool in the desegregation movement of the civil rights era.
Mr. Trump said that while Mr. Biden didn’t handle it well, “he was hit harder than he should’ve been hit.”
Ms. Harris, whose ancestry is black and Indian, revealed that she was one of the schoolchildren assisted by a desegregation busing effort in California in the 1970s.
Her statement — and Mr. Biden’s struggles to answer her — have gone viral.
The president, though, was unimpressed.
“I think she was given far too much credit for what she did,” he said. “That was so out of the can what she said. That thing was right out of a box.”
About Mr. Biden, he added: “This was not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with, okay? But it wasn’t — it wasn’t, I don’t think, nearly as bad as they portended it to be.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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