Trump’s Insults to Harris’s Intelligence? Jokes, Lara Trump Claims.

As the Republican Party strains to cast Donald J. Trump in a gentler light ahead of the fall election, Lara Trump volunteered a novel interpretation of the former president’s frequent, crude attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris’s intelligence: He’s kidding.

“Obviously, he’s kind of joking around there with the crowd at a Trump rally when he says those things,” Ms. Trump, the Republican Party chair and Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, claimed in an interview on NBC News on Tuesday.

In rallies and on social media, Mr. Trump has repeatedly disparaged Ms. Harris’s intellect during the campaign, declaring that she is “dumb as a rock” and “unable to put two sentences together.”

At a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, he suggested that Ms. Harris was “mentally disabled” and had been born that way.

Ms. Harris has a law degree and served as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California before being elected U.S. senator and then reaching the vice presidency, the highest public office any woman has ever held in the United States.

Mr. Trump’s crude remark on Saturday drew rebukes from several Republicans, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, who is running for the Senate.

The Trump campaign did not immediately reply to an inquiry about whether his comments about Ms. Harris’s intelligence had been intended as jokes.

The Harris campaign, which has typically avoided engaging with Mr. Trump’s crude attacks on the vice president, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview with CNN in August, Ms. Harris deflected a question about Mr. Trump’s attempts to question her racial identity by saying, “Same old, tired playbook — next question, please.”

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