PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former President Donald Trump taunted Vice President Kamala Harris at a Thursday press conference over her rare media appearances — saying she was “nasty” and “not smart” enough to do interviews or press briefings.

“She’s not doing a news conference. You know why? She’s not doing it because she can’t do a news conference,” Trump said during his wide-ranging, 65-minute presser at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Trump, 78, ratcheted up his attacks on Harris, 59, including by saying she was selected to replace President Biden as the Democrats’ nominee for “politically correct” reasons, as she took the lead in national polling.

“She won’t even do interviews with friendly people, because she can’t do better than Biden,” Trump told reporters.

Trump said his own accessibility contrasted notably with Harris’ reclusiveness.

“She’s not smart enough to do a news conference, and I’m sorry — we need smart people to lead this country because our country has never been in this danger before, both economically and from an outside perspective,” he said.

Republicans are attempting to end Harris’ more than two-week honeymoon phase of soft press coverage by goading her into unscripted engagements that draw scrutiny to her policies and performance as vice president. 

“She hasn’t done an interview. She can’t do an interview,” Trump said. “But I look forward to the debates.”

Trump announced he’s willing to do three debates with Harris — one on Fox News on September 4, another with ABC on September 10 and a third on NBC on September 25.

Trump and Biden previously committed to the ABC debate, but the former president had indicated he was backing out, citing his litigation against the outlet. 

The Republican nominee slammed Harris as “the most unpopular vice president” and said she was “nasty” to Biden, 81, when they faced off in the 2020 primaries by “calling him a racist.”

He claimed that Biden, who stepped aside July 21 and endorsed Harris, is “a very angry man right now.”

Trump claimed to know that Biden “regrets” that he picked Harris to be his running mate in 2020.

“She was the first loser in the primary system… She was the first one to quit. And she quit — she had no votes, no support, and she was a bad debater,” Trump said. “She never made it to Iowa. Then, for some reason, and I know he regrets it — you do too — he picked her and she turned on him, too.”

“The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m no Biden fan, but I tell you what, from a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away, and people were saying he lost after the debate, he couldn’t win,” Trump said.

“Well, I don’t know that that’s true, necessarily, but whether he could win or he couldn’t win, he had the right to run. And they took it away … They said, ‘We’ll do it the nice way or we’ll do it the hard way.’”

Trump’s focus on Harris not giving interviews followed his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, dramatically making that point at the foot of Air Force Two Wednesday.

The ex-president scoffed at a reporter’s question about Harris’ massive rallies this week in Philadelphia, western Wisconsin and Detroit.

“In South Carolina, we had 88,000 people. In Alabama, we had 68,000 people,” he claimed. “Nobody says about crowd size with me. But she has 1,000 people or 1,500 people and they say, ‘Oh, the enthusiasm is back.’ No, no, the enthusiasm is with me and the Republican Party.”

Harris on Tuesday night filled up Temple University’s Liacouras Center, which has a roughly 10,000-person capacity, and on Wednesday spoke to similarly large crowds in Eau Claire, Wis., and in the Motor City.

Trump dismissed Biden’s prediction in a CBS interview taped Wednesday that there may not be a peaceful transfer of power following the Nov. 5 election.

“Of course there’ll be a peaceful transfer, and there was last time,” he said — despite thousands of his supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent certification of Biden’s victory.

Trump spoke about a range of other foreign and domestic policy matters, saying he’d boost US security by dealing more effectively with adversaries such as China, North Korea and Russia.

The former chief executive said he and Chinese President Xi Jinping “had a very good relationship” but that the COVID-19 pandemic “broke up our relationship.”

“I think I’m going to get along great with China, President Xi of China and I were very good friends. We met right here,” Trump said.

“I think we’re going to have a great relationship, and I think it’s going to be mutually beneficial, but we cannot have it where China is taking advantage of the United States,” he continued — without addressing his prior suggestions that he will seek up to $60 trillion in pandemic “reparations” from Beijing.

Trump also addressed abortion rights — one of the biggest Republican liabilities, according to polling — arguing that “I think that abortion has become much less of an issue” and that “I think it’s actually going to be a very small issue.”

“Now the states are voting, and frankly, some of the votes are much more, if you could say liberal, than you would think. Ohio turned out to be. They had a big vote, and it turned out to be a much more liberal standing than people would have thought. Kansas, the same thing,” Trump said.

“And then you have Texas and you have other places where it may be different, but the issue has been brought back to the states now, and like Ronald Reagan, I believe in the exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.”

Trump predicted that a looming Florida ballot measure to restore abortion rights in the state would “go in a little more liberal way than people thought” — without explicitly saying his own position on the referendum.

He said Harris, who would be America’s first female and second non-white president, was faring better than Biden in polling because “she’s a woman, she represents certain groups of people.”

“I see her going way down to the polls now — now that people are finding out that she destroyed San Francisco, she destroyed the state of California, along with Gov. Gavin Newscum [sic],” Trump said, even though the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows Harris leading by half a percentage point.

“The honeymoon period is going to end,” he insisted — less than three months before Election Day.

Trump also said at the press conference that he had a small “scar” from the bullet that grazed his ear in an assassination attempt last month and expressed sympathy for the plight of first son Hunter Biden, calling controversies around his drug use and foreign business dealings “tragic.”

Trump indicated he would not instruct the Justice Department to prosecute the Bidens, noting that he hadn’t done so against his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, despite what he called her “pretty evil” conduct mishandling classified documents with a private email server.