NewsNation host Chris Cuomo suggested during a Thursday podcast that his audience should resent how former President Donald Trump shook Vice President Kamala Harris’ hand during their debate.
When Harris and Trump took the stage for their Tuesday night debate on ABC News, the vice president walked past her podium to shake his hand and introduce herself. Cuomo, on “The Chris Cuomo Project,” asserted that the former president’s behavior during the handshake was off-putting to everyone who watched.
Read: CNN Host Says Voters ‘Don’t Really Know’ Kamala Harris’ Policy Proposals
“From the first moment, it was exactly what Trump should have never allowed it to be. When Kamala Harris walked over — ‘Yeah, hello Kamala, Kamala, hi’ … from that moment, it was a, ‘What the fuck are you doing? What are you doing?’ Just forget politics,” Cuomo said. “Forget politics. Imagine what your wife, what your husband would say if you were in a situation like that, and the woman came up to you to shake hands, and you treated her like that.”
“From that jump, you’re giving it away. You know the idea of ‘fake it till you make it’? You want to be president of the United States? Nobody wants someone representing them who’s going to treat that woman like that in that moment,” he continued. “We both know it. Why? From the moment it started, he allowed it to be the only thing that he could not let it be. Shocked me.”
Read: James Carville Melts Down And Demands Ex-Trump Officials Bend The Knee To Harris
Pollster Frank Luntz said on Wednesday that the “contempt” Trump displayed to Harris throughout their debate might have repelled enough female voters to doom his campaign. Trump appeared to hardly ever look at Harris during the debate.
“For every woman, that reminds them of their husband or their boyfriend simply ignoring what they have to say, having disrespect and contempt,” Luntz said. “And it’s agitating to women watching. Trump can’t just win with men, he’s got to get women … Donald Trump reminds women of their first husband’s divorce lawyer. That is just absolutely disastrous.”
“Right now, the gender gap is roughly even. She’s up 15, 17 points among women, he’s up 13, 14 points among men, and that’s who you get the gap that there are more female voters, but it is this mirror image of each other … And you’re going to see this in the polls, take about four or five days to show up, but I do think that this has the potential to be a fatal mistake on Trump’s part,” he added.
Read: Op-Ed: The Big Trump-Harris Debate Informed Little, Changed Less
Cuomo defended the motivations of Trump’s backers during a Tuesday episode of his podcast, arguing they support him because he’s “a disruptive force of what they want changed,” not because they are “like Trump.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.