WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris used the last major speech of her campaign to unleash a fiery broadside against former President Donald Trump, calling her rival “consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power” and presenting herself as a fighter who would usher in a new generation of leadership.
In a speech in front of what her campaign said was around 75,000 people assembled at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House in Washington, Harris sharpened her case, gesturing to the nation’s seat of power and bringing up the specter of a riot that had unfolded less than 2 miles to the east.
“In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office,” she said, pointing back to the building behind her. “On Day 1, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
But her speech had to bear more weight than just another attack on Trump. So on the 101st day of her improbable presidential campaign, Harris presented herself as a former federal prosecutor who had long worked for the public good — pausing to remind her audience that she had spent most of her career outside Washington and assuring her listeners that “not all good ideas come from here.”
Relaying her case in a way that was plain-spoken but forceful, Harris told the crowd that she would not be a perfect president but that she would govern with unity in mind, based on what she said was a “lifelong instinct to protect” people who had been abused or victimized.
But she also used the arc of history to make her case, saying that the country was born “when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant” and that, over centuries, Americans had fought threats both foreign and domestic to preserve the promise of democracy.
“They did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” Harris said. “The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised.”
Trump did not immediately move to undermine her argument calling for unity, but the current president might have.
Shortly before Harris began speaking, President Joe Biden, who did not attend the speech but stayed in the White House, joined a Zoom call from the White House with members of Voto Latino, an organization that aims to rally Latino voters.
On the call, Biden criticized a racist comment made by a comedian about Puerto Rico at Trump’s rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden in New York, saying, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
The White House insisted that he had said “his supporter’s demonization,” referring only to the comic, and Biden said later on social media that he had been referring “to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage.”
At a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump immediately seized on the comments, reminding his supporters that, eight years before, Hillary Clinton had referred to many of them as “deplorables,” a comment that came at a political cost.
“That didn’t work out,” Trump said of that episode. “‘Garbage,’ I think, is worse, right?”
Harris and her campaign have been careful to present her as a separate entity from Biden without undermining him or his policies, and she did not move to step away from him Tuesday. Her campaign had no immediate comment on his remarks.
Throughout her speech, Harris instead tried to keep the focus trained on the comparison between herself and Trump. As she ticked through her policy plans, she warned that his proposals would continue to harm Americans.
She said that he would again aim to repeal the Affordable Care Act, legislation that is now popular among a majority of Americans but whose provisions Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, suggested Tuesday he would seek to overhaul.
Harris said Trump would again enact tax cuts for the country’s highest earners. And she reiterated that her administration would crack down on corporate price gouging and help lower costs for Americans through tax credits for homebuyers, parents and caregivers.
“There’s something about people being treated unfairly or overlooked that, frankly, just gets to me — I don’t like it,” Harris said, adding, “If you give me the chance to fight on your behalf, there is nothing in the world that will stand in my way.”
She said a Harris administration would be a bulwark against a raft of abortion restrictions and highlighted the possibility of a broader rollback of reproductive rights. She pointed to other plans laid out by Project 2025, the policy blueprint for a conservative presidential administration written by many of Trump’s allies.
“I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court justices took away from the women of America,” Harris said to the roaring crowd.
As she spoke, Harris implicitly revived a central but unfulfilled promise from her predecessor on the ticket, Biden, saying that she could be a leader who united Americans. It was a call back to the endorsements from Republicans she has gathered along the way, and an attempt to persuade still-undecided voters to consider what the future could look like under a Harris presidency.
“I pledge to listen to experts,” Harris said. “To those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. And to people who disagree with me.
She continued: “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”
Even as she made a case for herself, her warnings about Trump remained the spine of her argument. She repeatedly tried to tie his behavior and his increasingly threatening language to the forces that animated the 2021 riot at the Capitol, arguing that a second Trump term would pose a dire threat to American civic life.
“Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other — that’s who he is,” Harris said. “But America, I am here tonight to say, That’s not who we are.”
Her speech was delivered days after speakers at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden targeted Black people, Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Jews, Harris and other Democrats. Trump has not distanced himself from those comments, though his campaign has tried.
Hoping to draw a starker contrast with Trump, Harris spent much of the day Thursday at a historic building in Washington, rehearsing the speech and delivering last-minute revisions as advisers looked on. The goal was to hone the best argument to win over people who might be distrustful of both Harris and Trump but might be unable or unwilling to stomach another Trump term.
Of course, Harris enters the final days of her campaign with several vulnerabilities, including her loyalty to Biden on most of his policies, including U.S. support of Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The race remains in a dead heat: The New York Times’ polling average shows the two candidates essentially tied in every battleground state.
During her speech, Harris offered only a glancing reference to immigration, another top issue for Americans. She downplayed the debate as “an issue to scare up votes in an election” and called immigration a challenge that needed to be solved, proposing an “earned path” to citizenship for farmworkers and immigrants brought to the United States as children. She did not mention Gaza, though on the outskirts of the Ellipse, several people held signs protesting the war.
Before she ended her remarks and turned her sights back to the campaign trail, she put herself, and an audience that spread across the Ellipse and, farther in the distance, onto the grounds of the Washington Monument, squarely in the scope of American history.
“That’s why I’m in this race,” she said. “To fight for the people, just like I always have.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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