Trump
Attacks Harris as ‘Radical’ in First Rally Since Her Ascent
The Trump
campaign has sought to tie Vice President Kamala Harris to unpopular Biden
administration policies and paint her as too liberal for independent or
moderate voters.
Michael Gold
By Michael
Gold
July 24,
2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/us/politics/trump-rally-kamala-harris.html
Former
President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday blasted Vice President Kamala Harris as
radically liberal and blamed her for what he called the Biden administration’s
“disastrous” policies, repurposing attacks he had long leveled at President
Biden now that Ms. Harris is poised to be his opponent in November.
But in a
signal of how his campaign strategy may shift after Mr. Biden dropped out of
the race and Ms. Harris cleared the field of potential Democratic rivals, Mr.
Trump at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., denigrated her time as a prosecutor and
attacked Ms. Harris as “radical” on abortion, an effort to undercut what may be
two of her strongest arguments to voters.
Ms. Harris
has vowed to restore nationwide abortion rights, an issue that has galvanized
Democrats and lifted their candidates since Supreme Court justices appointed by
Mr. Trump overturned Roe v. Wade. She is expected in her campaign to highlight
a “prosecutor versus felon” message that will draw attention to her background
as a prosecutor while pointing to Mr. Trump’s four criminal cases and 34 felony
convictions in Manhattan.
Mr. Trump,
who earlier this year said he supported states’ setting their own abortion
policies, has never appeared particularly comfortable talking about the issue.
In Charlotte, he stumbled to pronounce the word “abortion,” as he called Ms.
Harris “a total radical” on the issue, then falsely claimed that she supported
abortion “even after birth, the execution of a baby,” something no state law
supports.
Later, Mr.
Trump argued that she had been too lax on crime as San Francisco’s district
attorney and overly supportive of criminal justice reform policies such as
ending cash bail. To underscore his point, he announced that he had received
the endorsement of the National Association of Police Organizations, whose
president he brought onstage.
“Kamala
Harris wants to be the president for savage criminals, illegal aliens,” Mr.
Trump said to a crowd of thousands in the Bojangles Coliseum, many of whom
waved “Back the Blue” signs. “I will be the president for law-abiding
Americans.”
Mr. Trump’s
gambit to attack Ms. Harris on those issues carries political risks. By
attacking her views on abortion, an issue he had largely minimized in his stump
speech, he will most likely draw attention to his role in overturning Roe. And
even as he attacked Ms. Harris’s campaign strategy, he twice used the phrase
“convicted felon,” an inadvertent reminder of his criminal cases.
Mr. Trump
and his campaign have been put on their heels by the sudden disruption this
week of a presidential contest that had seemed set in place for months. In the
days since Sunday, when Mr. Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Ms.
Harris, Republicans have unveiled several lines of attacks.
Much of Mr.
Trump’s speech on Wednesday consisted of his standard rally material. He again
criticized Mr. Biden’s efforts to address climate change, likened many of those
crossing the border to the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter, and repeated his
false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
At many
points, he re-aimed at Ms. Harris — whose name he repeatedly mispronounced —
the same criticisms that he had deployed against Mr. Biden for months,
particularly over immigration and inflation, two issues where the president has
polled poorly.
Mr. Trump
tied Ms. Harris to all of Mr. Biden’s policies, calling her “the ultraliberal
driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe.” He focused intently on
the U.S. border with Mexico, an issue he has tried to put at the center of his
campaign, calling Ms. Harris the “border czar” at least five times during this
speech.
Ms. Harris
never formally received that title, but Mr. Biden deputized her to oversee
efforts to address the factors in Central American countries that were causing
a surge of crossings early in his presidency. Though the surge has subsided
from its peak, Republicans, including Mr. Trump, have argued Ms. Harris, who
was never directly responsible for border security, failed in her mission.
Mr. Trump
also denounced her for casting a tiebreaking vote on legislation that he said
had caused inflation and said she had embarrassed herself by trying and failing
to deter Russia from invading Ukraine.
And building
on days in which his allies have picked at Ms. Harris’s record as a senator and
prosecutor, Mr. Trump criticized Ms. Harris as a “radical-left lunatic” who was
more liberal than Mr. Biden, part of an effort to reduce her appeal to moderate
and independent voters who helped deliver the presidency to Mr. Biden in 2020.
“She’s worse
than him. Because he’s a fake liberal. You know, he wasn’t that liberal. He was
fake,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s a real liberal.”
Ammar
Moussa, a Harris campaign spokesman, accused Mr. Trump of trying to distract
voters from the issues that mattered.
“The choice
this November will be Trump’s Project 2025 agenda to ban abortion nationwide
and give himself unlimited, unchecked power; or Vice President Harris, who is
fighting to protect freedom and ensure every American gets a fair shot,” Mr.
Moussa said in a statement.
Mr. Trump
continued to attack Mr. Biden as unfit for office. He accused Ms. Harris, whom
he has given the nickname “Lyin’ Kamala,” of taking part in a “cover-up” to
hide concerns about Mr. Biden’s fitness for the presidency.
After
repeatedly insulting Mr. Biden’s intelligence for months, he on Wednesday
mocked Ms. Harris for having failed the California bar exam the first time she
took it.
It was one
of several times Mr. Trump transferred arguments he has made about Mr. Biden to
his new opponent. For more than a year, Mr. Trump has insisted that Mr. Biden
was the mastermind behind the criminal cases against him.
On
Wednesday, he suggested those cases were “all headed up” by Ms. Harris, because
she was a former prosecutor. Yet, at the same time, he insisted Ms. Harris was
a “really bad” prosecutor, which seemed to undercut his point and mirrored the
similar conflict he had created by referring to Mr. Biden as both “sleepy” and
“corrupt.”
And after
months of trying to drive a wedge between American Jews and the Democratic
Party by criticizing Mr. Biden’s approach to Israel’s war on Gaza, Mr. Trump
accused Ms. Harris of being “against the Jewish people” because she did not
attend Wednesday’s address to Congress by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ms. Harris,
whose husband is Jewish, is expected to meet with Mr. Netanyahu privately on
Thursday.
Michael Gold
is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J.
Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections. More about
Michael Gold
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