Republicans took to the airwaves Sunday to criticize a surging Kamala Harris, calling the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee a “dangerous liberal” as US conservatives’ lines of attack on the vice-president began to solidify.

In appearances across CNN and Fox News, senior Republican figures Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham and former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis each attempted to paint Harris – who is typically seen as a centrist Democrat – as having far-left politics.

Those remarks came after Trump sought to insult Harris at a rally on Friday night. The ex-president appeared to deliberately mispronounce Harris’s first name, claimed she is “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice-president in American history” and stated: “She was a bum three weeks ago.”

Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Cotton, the US senator from Arkansas, said: “For four years things were good” during Trump’s presidency. He argued that after Joe Biden took the White House in 2020 with Harris as his running mate, “everything has gone to hell”.