Top Republicans call Kamala Harris a ‘dangerous liberal’ as attacks ramp up

Republicans took to the airwaves on Sunday to criticize a surging Kamala Harris , calling the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee a “dangerous liberal” as US conservatives’ lines of attack on the vice-president began to solidify.

Related: Buttigieg: Republicans calling Kamala Harris a diversity hire is ‘bad look’

In appearances across CNN and Fox News, the senior Republican figures Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham and the former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis each attempted to paint Harris – who is typically seen as a centrist Democrat – as having far-left politics.

Those remarks came after Trump sought to insult Harris at a rally on Friday night. The ex-president appeared to deliberately mispronounce Harris’s first name, claimed she is “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice-president in American history” and stated: “She was a bum three weeks ago.”

Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Cotton, a US senator from Arkansas, said: “For four years things were good” during Trump’s presidency. He argued that after Joe Biden took the White House in 2020 with Harris as his running mate, “everything has gone to hell”.

“And it will be much worse under Kamala Harris,” Cotton said. “Just look at her record. She wants to ban private health insurance, she wants to ban fossil fuel production, she wants to ban guns.”

In 2019, Harris did propose a universal healthcare plan during her run for president. But the plan did not propose eliminating private health insurance. Harris has not said that she wants to ban fossil fuel production. And it is untrue that Harris wants to ban all guns, although she has said high-capacity rifles – used in many US mass shootings – should be banned.

Cotton added: “Kamala Harris is a dangerous liberal. She makes Joe Biden look competent and moderate by contrast.”

In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation show, the South Carolina US senator Graham also attacked Harris as being too liberal.

“If you expect vice-president Harris to change the course we’re on as a nation, you’re going to be sadly disappointed,” Graham said of the candidate endorsed by Biden after he halted his re-election campaign on 21 July.

“She is the most liberal senator in the United States Senate. There is no liberal horse that she has chosen not to ride. She sponsored the Green New Deal and Medicare for all. At the end of the day recasting her as something she’s not – she’s a nice person but she’s incredibly liberal. I mean, major league liberal,” Graham said.

A noted military hawk, Graham attempted to tie Harris to Biden’s policies in the Middle East.

“When it comes to Iran, Biden and Harris have been a colossal failure in terms of controlling the Ayatollah. They’ve enriched him and Israel is paying the price,” Graham said. He suggested that Iran could “sprint to a nuclear weapon” in the four months leading up to the US election.

Graham was asked about JD Vance’s characterization of Harris and others as “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives”.

“This idea of trying to marginalize JD and make him some kind of bad person is not going to work, because he’s not a bad person – he’s a good person,” Graham said. The scrutiny over Vance comes as some Republicans are said to be concerned about Trump having selected him to be his running mate.

DeSantis , the Florida governor who became locked in a fierce battle with Trump as the pair ran for the Republican presidential nomination, claimed that “the entrenched corporate media” will attempt to “rewrite history” regarding Harris.

“They’re going to try to present her as something she’s just not,” DeSantis told Fox News’ s Sunday Morning Futures.

“She owns all the policies. She’s not going to be able to distance herself from them, and most Americans think that this country’s going in the wrong direction.”

DeSantis did concede that Republicans would have preferred to run against Biden, who had generally fallen several points behind Trump in opinion polls before Harris’s introduction into the race essentially reset it.

“You take somebody like Harris, who’s not exactly lighting the world on fire – but Biden makes her look like Socrates just because we’re so used to him not even being able to do anything,” DeSantis said.

Byron Donalds, the Republican congressman for Florida who had been rumored to be a potential Trump running mate, joined in the criticism of Harris on Sunday as Republicans appeared to solidify around the idea of painting her as an extreme liberal.

“She wanted Medicaid for all, which would have cost our country easily $100tn. She wanted the Green New Deal, the massive old Green New Deal, not the scaled down version they were able to get through Congress,” Donalds told Sunday Morning Futures .

Donalds, who has previously stressed the need to “unite this country”, also took aim at Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina, and Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona. Both men are rumored to be potential Harris running mates.

“Knowing both of those gentlemen, they’re both boring and nobody’s really going to care. But at the end of the day, this is about Kamala Harris’s terrible record versus a record of success from Donald Trump,” Donalds said.