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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
Kamala Harris attacked Donald Trump as “unstable”, “obsessed with revenge” and “out for unchecked power” as she called on Americans to “turn the page” on her Republican rival and vote for her instead.
But on the night she made one of the biggest speeches in her career, Republicans attacked her party for comments by US President Joe Biden that appeared to refer to Trump supporters as “garbage”.
With just one week until the November 5 election, Harris pledged to be a “president for all Americans” and “to always put country above party and self” but did not stint on attacking her Republican rival.
“America, we know what Donald Trump has in mind: more chaos, more division and policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else,” she said on Tuesday. “I offer a different path, and I ask for your vote.”
Speaking in front of a crowd that her campaign estimated at 75,000, Harris added: “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 the table.”
Trump’s own attempt at a closing argument at New York’s Madison Square Garden at the weekend was overshadowed by racist and misogynist comments, with the comedian Tony Hinchliffe describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”.
But on Tuesday, Trump’s allies leapt on Biden’s response to the controversy.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” the president said in a Zoom video call with the organisation Voto Latino on Tuesday evening. “This demonisation of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
Biden later took to X to say he was referring to the “hateful rhetoric” by Hinchliffe rather than to Trump supporters as a whole. The White House released a transcript that rendered the president’s reference to garbage as “his supporter’s” rather than “his supporters”.
But his comments risked echoing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 reference to “half of Trump’s supporters” as a “basket of deplorables” — remarks some critics said contributed to her surprise defeat in that year’s election.
“Kamala Harris and her boss Joe Biden are attacking half of the country,” JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, said on X, while former Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy described the president’s comment as the “‘basket of deplorables’ moment of this election”.
Trump himself told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday that the New York event was an “absolute lovefest”.
Harris’s campaign said the location for her speech had been chosen to draw a sharp contrast between her and her Republican opponent.
She delivered her address in Washington, with the White House illuminated behind her.
The vice-president stood on the Ellipse, the site of Trump’s January 6 2021 speech in which he called on his supporters to “fight like hell” hours before they stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to halt Biden from being declared president.
“We know that there are still a lot of voters out there that are still trying to decide who to support or whether to vote at all,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign chair. “We are very focused on making sure that we are doing everything in our power to reach the voters that are still making up their mind.”
The Financial Times poll tracker shows Harris and Trump in a virtual tie in the seven swing states that are likely to determine who wins the presidency.
Many among the crowd in Washington said they were cautiously optimistic Harris would defeat Trump.
Savannah Jones, a 27-year-old lawyer from Utah, said Harris was the “only reasonable choice”, adding: “I’m nervous, but I think she can win.”
Zachary Mohling, a 26-year-old software engineer from the Washington suburbs, agreed.
“The polls were wrong in 2016, they were wrong in 2020. Every election cycle they try to account for the silent Trump voter and now they’ve gone too far,” he said.
As election day nears, Harris has stepped up her argument that Trump poses a grave threat to American democracy.
Last week, she attacked the former president for being “increasingly unhinged and unstable” after John Kelly, Trump’s one-time chief of staff, told The New York Times that Trump was an “authoritarian” who admired Adolf Hitler and fell into the “general definition of fascist”.
The vice-president has also criss-crossed the country with Liz Cheney, the conservative former Republican congresswoman who broke with Trump and her party over the 2021 Capitol attack and in September said she would be voting for Harris given the “danger that Donald Trump poses”.
The sober warnings stand in stark contrast to the image of a “joyful warrior” that the Harris campaign cultivated over the summer, after she replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
But aides insisted her closing message would resonate with millions of voters frustrated by the coarseness and division that has plagued US politics in recent years.
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