Former US president Donald Trump has 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 levelled at President Joe Biden now that Harris is poised to be his opponent in November.
But in a signal of how his campaign strategy may shift after Biden dropped out of the race and Harris cleared the field of potential Democratic rivals, Trump at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday denigrated her time as a prosecutor and attacked Harris as “radical” on abortion, an effort to undercut what may be two of her strongest arguments to voters.
Harris has vowed to restore nationwide abortion rights, an issue that has galvanised Democrats and lifted their candidates since supreme court justices appointed by 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 Trump’s four criminal cases and 34 felony convictions in Manhattan.
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 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.
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Later, 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,” 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.”
Trump’s gambit to attack Harris on those issues carries political risks. By attacking her views on abortion, an issue he had largely minimised in his stump speech, he will most likely draw attention to his role in overturning Roe. And even as he attacked Harris’s campaign strategy, he twice used the phrase “convicted felon”, an inadvertent reminder of his criminal cases.
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 Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, Republicans have unveiled several lines of attacks.
Much of Trump’s speech on Wednesday consisted of his standard rally material. He again criticised Biden’s efforts to address climate change, likened many of those crossing the border to fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter and repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
At many points, he re-aimed at Harris – whose name he repeatedly mispronounced – the same criticisms that he had deployed against Biden for months, particularly over immigration and inflation, two issues where the president has polled poorly.
Trump tied Harris to all of Biden’s policies, calling her “the ultraliberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe”. He focused intently on the US border with Mexico, an issue he has tried to put at the centre of his campaign, calling Harris the “border czar” at least five times during this speech.
Harris never formally received that title, but Biden deputised 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 Trump, have argued that Harris, who was never directly responsible for border security, failed in her mission.
Trump also denounced her for casting a tie-breaking 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 Harris’s record as a senator and prosecutor, Trump criticised Harris as a “radical-left lunatic” who was more liberal than Biden, part of an effort to reduce her appeal to moderate and independent voters who helped deliver the presidency to Biden in 2020.
“She’s worse than him. Because he’s a fake liberal. You know, he wasn’t that liberal. He was fake,” Trump said. “She’s a real liberal.”
Ammar Moussa, a Harris campaign spokesman, accused 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,” Moussa said in a statement.
Trump continued to attack Biden as unfit for office. He accused Harris, whom he has given the nickname “Lyin’ Kamala”, of taking part in a “cover-up” to hide concerns about Biden’s fitness for the presidency.
After repeatedly insulting Biden’s intelligence for months, he on Wednesday mocked Harris for having failed the California bar exam the first time she took it.
It was one of several times Trump transferred arguments he has made about Biden to his new opponent. For more than a year, Trump has insisted that Biden was the mastermind behind the criminal cases against him.
On Wednesday, he suggested those cases were “all headed up” by Harris, because she was a former prosecutor. Yet, at the same time, he insisted Harris was a “really bad” prosecutor, which seemed to undercut his point and mirrored the similar conflict he had created by referring to Biden as both “sleepy” and “corrupt”.
And after months of trying to drive a wedge between American Jews and the Democratic Party by criticising Biden’s approach to Israel’s war on Hamas, Trump accused Harris of being “against the Jewish people” because she did not attend Wednesday’s address to Congress by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Harris, whose husband is Jewish, was due to meet Netanyahu privately Thursday. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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