Former president Donald Trump poked fun at vice president Kamala Harris during the Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, criticizing his political rival for failing to show up at the charity event in person.
Harris addressed the crowd at the white-tie event, which raises funds for Catholics charities, in a pre-recorded video – a highly unusual move for a presidential candidate. It has become a tradition for presidential candidates to speak at the event since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960.
The vice president is the first presidential contender to skip out on the dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984.
“I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” Trump said.
He went on to joke that Harris must be “out receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” a reference to a viral video from earlier this month of the Michigan governor feeding a chip to a leftist influencer on her knees.
Trump accused the vice president of being “disrespectful to Catholics.”
He also quipped about the Democratic nominee’s odd’s of winning the election, saying, “There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris but I’m not worried about them. Their wives and their wives’ lovers are voting for me.”
Meanwhile, the former president wasn’t the only one who criticized Harris’s decision to sit out the event. The crowd booed when it was announced she would not be appearing in person. Ahead of the event, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, said he was “disappointed” she couldn’t make it.
“I really thought and I tried to press this, Jim, with their people, this is literally up her alley,” Dolan said in an interview with Jim Gaffigan, who emceed the event. “I mean, here you got somebody talking about ‘Oh, can’t we bring amity and unity?’”
“It’s not a campaign speech. It’s not a stump speech,” Dolan added. “Now, some candidates might use it for that, but that’s not the nature or purpose of the evening, either. You know, Ronald Reagan’s line [was] the Al Smith dinner is the rare time where politicians act like statesmen.”
Harris wasn’t the only one on the receiving end of Trump’s jokes Thursday night. The former president went on to take shots at several other Democrats, some of whom were in the crowd.
He suggested that second gentleman Doug Emhoff shouldn’t “be allowed near nannies,” after Emhoff in August publicly admitted to having an affair during his first marriage. The public acknowledgement came only after the Daily Mail reported that he cheated on his first wife and got their nanny pregnant. That joke led to groans from the crowd, leading Trump to question the “idiots that gave me this stuff.”
Trump also took a jab at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: “But look on the bright side Chuck, considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses you still have a chance to become the first woman president.”
The Republican presidential nominee blasted former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, calling him a “terrible mayor.” “I don’t give a sh** if this is comedy or not,” he said.
Harris, for her part, appeared in a pre-recorded clip featuring actress Molly Shannon as her Catholic character from Saturday Night Live and the 1999 film Superstar, Mary Katherine Gallagher.
Shannon told Harris not to joke about Catholics and said Jesus would be a “fact-checker” at the dinner.
Harris said making fun of Catholics at the dinner would be like “insulting Detroit when you’re in Detroit,” a jab at Trump, who previously said the city was in decline.
The Harris campaign responded to Trump’s speech in a statement saying it plans to remind voters “how unstable he’s become.”
“He may refuse to release his medical records, but every day he makes it clear to the American people that he is not up to the job,” spokesman Ammar Moussa said.