President Trump lashes out at Biden vice presidential pick Harris, calls her 'meanest, most horrible' US senator

In a White House press conference Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump answered questions from the media regarding Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's vice presidential pick, Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). Biden had announced his pick for VP on Twitter earlier in the day.

Over the span of several answers, Trump listed a number of grievances with Harris -- a candidate whose attorney general campaign he donated to in 2011 and 2013 -- addressing her record on environmental, health and budgetary policies.

In response to a question about Harris' prosecutorial past against marijuana offenders and a subsequent claim she made that she had smoked marijuana before, Trump posited that she "said things that were untrue."

He went on to discuss a series of other issues he has with Harris' platform.

"She's very big into raising taxes, she wants to slash funds for our military at a rate that nobody can even believe," he continued. "She is against fracking. She's against petroleum products. ... She's in favor of socialized medicine, she wants to take health care plans away from 180 million Americans, who are very very happy with their health insurance."

(Harris has actually varied on the idea of "Medicare for All," but during the primaries, eventually backed her own plan to grow Medicare with the assistance of private insurers.)

Trump also repeatedly called her "nasty" or "nastier," particularly when discussing her treatment of his formerly embattled then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.

Then, repeating an ethnic slur he's used in the past to label Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Trump said Harris was "even nastier" than Warren was to Biden.

"She was very disrespectful," he added. "It's hard to pick someone that disrespectful ... I thought she was the meanest, most horrible, most disrespectful of anyone in the U.S. Senate. She's also known as just about the most liberal person in the U.S. Senate."

Harris hasn't yet commented on Trump's statements.

Alyssa Pereira is a culture editor at SFGate. Email: alyssa.pereira@sfgate.com -- Twitter: @alyspereira