Trump Attacks Harris as ‘Radical’ in First Rally Since Her Ascent

 

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