One Night, Two Candidates: How Harris and Trump Are Closing Their Campaigns
Vice president drew contrast with her opponent, vowed to be president for all Americans
Not that the contrast wasn’t stark before, but Tuesday evening shown a unique lens on the two major-party nominees closing in on Election Day.
While Vice President Kamala Harris was speaking to a massive, optimistic rally outdoors in the nation’s capital, Donald Trump was cocooned with Sean Hannity, of Fox News, trying to do damage control for offensive and racist remarks made at his major rally over the weekend in New York City.
Dubbed by her campaign as her “closing argument” to voters who will decide whether she or Trump will be the next president of the United States, Harris spoke at the same spot near the White House where Trump spoke to supporters on January 6, 2021, encouraging them to go to the US Capitol.
Ultimately, of course, a large number of those supporters ultimately rioted at the Capitol in a violent insurrection in an illegal attempt to block Democrat Joe Biden’s certification as president.
That Harris chose the same location on the Ellipse was no accident. She drew a huge, optimistic and energetic crowd of an estimated 60,000 supporters where she laid out the threat to democracy that Trump represents.
“Look, we know who Donald Trump is. He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election. An election that he knew he lost,” she said. “Americans died as a result of that attack. 140 law enforcement officers were injured because of that attack. And while Donald Trump sat in the White House watching as the violence unfolded on television, he was told by his staff that the mob wanted to kill his own vice president. And Donald Trump responded with two words: ‘So what?’
“America, that’s who Donald Trump is. And that’s who is asking you to give him another four years in the Oval Office,” the vice president added.
Harris pledged to be a president for all Americans. And rather than treat those who disagree with her as the “enemies within,” as Trump does, she vowed to give them a seat at the table to find common ground.
“I will always listen to you,” she said.
Trump, however, spent his Tuesday night sitting with one of his most prominent propagandists on the right-wing Fox News, trying to spin racist comments made by a comedian at his rally at Madison Square Garden, in which the comic called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
The slur immediately angered Puerto Ricans across the country, many of whom are voters in the battleground, swing states Trump needs to win if he is to be elected president again.
Trump claimed that “I have no idea who he is.”
“No, I have unbelievably good relationship with Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people. Who this comedian was, I have no idea,” he claimed.
Trump also claimed that his campaign didn’t vet the material used by offensive comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe.
But that appears to be one more Trump lie, as journalist Marc Caputo reported this week in The Bulwark that Trump campaign staff did vet Hinchcliffe’s material and asked him to strike the part where he would have offensively referred to Harris as a “c-word.”
But even with falsehoods, the split between the Harris and Trump campaigns couldn’t have been clearer than they were Tuesday night, just a week before Election Day.
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