Former President Donald Trump’s closing message to a number of different groups increasingly includes this harsh line: Members of the group not voting for him need to have their “head examined.”
“Any African American or Hispanic that votes for Kamala … you got to have your head examined,” Trump said during a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday night. “They are screwing you.”
It’s part of an ongoing trend of the former president telling specific demographic groups that they deserve ridicule or have something wrong with their mental state if they’re not voting for him.
In recent weeks, the commentary has increasingly focused on ethnicity, age and religion.
The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.
Trump has most often used the construct when speaking of Jewish voter who support Harris or, before her, President Joe Biden. For most of this election cycle, when asked about or discussing the Jewish vote, Trump has used some version of they should “have their head examined.”
“Biden has totally lost control of the Israel situation,” Trump said in April of the war in Gaza. “Any Jewish person who votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined.”
He has also pre-emptively blamed Jews if he loses next month, saying they would “have a lot to do with the loss.” Trump got an estimated 30% of the Jewish vote in 2020, up from 24% during his 2016 White House bid.
Trump has said the same of Catholic voters, a tightly divided swing group that favored Biden over Trump in 2020, 52%-47%, according to the NBC News exit poll. It’s a group of voters Trump won 50-46 in 2016 when running against Hillary Clinton.
“I don’t know what she has against our Catholic friends,” Trump said of Harris on social media in September, “but it must be a lot, because she certainly hasn’t been very nice to them. … Any Catholic that votes for Comrade Kamala Harris should have their head examined.”
Trump also recently applied the “head examined” rhetoric to senior citizens, who favored Trump by a smaller margin (4 points) over Biden in 2020 than they did over Clinton (9 points) in 2016. Polls this year have shown another tight race among voters age 65 and over.
“Our seniors have been devastated by inflation. We are going to have no tax on Social Security for our seniors,” Trump said at a late September event.
“If any senior does not vote for Trump, we’re gonna have to send you to a psychiatrist to have your head examined,” he added.
Jewish and Catholic leaders have warned about the dangers of Trump’s language, which they said amounts to a religious loyalty test.
“It’s deeply dangerous, deeply disturbing, and it’s part of this broader normalization of antisemitism,” Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the nonpartisan Jewish Council for Public Affairs, told NBC News in September. “Trump believes that he’s entitled to the Jewish vote, entitled to support from Jews, and when they don’t give it to him, he immediately defaults to this idea of the disloyal or bad Jew.”
