Campaigning for a return to the White House to avenge his 2016 loss, Donald Trump continued his attacks on Kamala Harris with a string of invectives, adding an innuendo this time about her personal life in the latest speech.
“We have to work hard to define her,” Republican presidential candidate Trump said addressing a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, and with his running mate J D Vance tried to do that by pinning on his Democratic rival the shortcomings of President Joe Biden’s rule, and going further to paint Harris as an “ultra-radical”.
In a low blow, while dredging up her political past, Trump added a sly reference to Willie Brown, a powerful California politician 30 years her senior with whom Harris had a romantic relationship decades ago when she was beginning to actively get involved in politics.
“She had a very good friend named Willie Brown,” Trump slipped into his criticism of her career as a lax prosecutor. “He knows more about her than anybody has ever known. He could tell you every single thing about her, to tell you stories and you're not gonna want to hear”.
And then he continued with the professional criticism, calling her a Marxist, a leftist prosecutor who was soft on murderers and rapists.
On Wednesday, Trump had made a bizarre claim about Harris saying at a convention of Black journalists that she had always claimed to be Indian and only lately had spoken of her African heritage on her Jamaican father’s side.
In fact, Harris has always made her African heritage her primary identity, writing in her memoir that her mother wanted her and her sister to be raised as African Americans because that is how they would be viewed through the US racial prism.
In one of his many ridiculing of Harris, he pronounces her name as “Ka-maa-la”, which has drawn criticism.
Responding to the backlash, he said at the Saturday rally, “There are 19 different ways of saying it; she likes only three”. He went on try variations and settled back on his deprecating pronunciation, adding “Crazy” to it.
On Saturday, just a day after Harris clinched her nomination in an electronic poll of her party convention delegates, Trump was holding his rally at the same venue where Harris had on Tuesday thrown him a challenge, “The momentum in this race is shifting and there are signs Donald Trump is feeling it.”
Trump’s lead in the polls has shrunk to 1.2 per cent according to the RealClear Politics aggregation of polls.
In Georgia, he has a narrow lead of 2 per cent over Harris in the aggregation, while losing to her the lead he had over Biden in four of the seven battleground states, which can turn either way and determine the election’s outcome.
Georgia put several markers in his political timeline: He lost the state narrowly in 2016 and allegedly tried to get state officials to reverse it, for which he is on trial accused of election interference.
In what would be grist for the Democratic campaign mill, Trump congratulated Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for the prisoner exchange while attempting to claim that Biden was weak.
“I want to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal,” he said alluding to the international roster of Russian spies, an assassin and hackers freed by the West.
He claimed that he had never paid anything for the release of US prisoners held abroad.
But he said that under Biden’s deal to get freedom for three Americans, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, “they released some of the greatest killers anywhere in the world” and that sets a bad precedent.
In a speech that was interspersed with bravado, exaggerations, outright inaccuracies and fantastic promises, Trump repeated many of the criticisms of the Biden administration -- the inflation, the border crisis with the influx of illegal migrants, crime, and the flow of deadly narcotics.
He used fresh ammunition on the economy with a report on Friday that showed unemployment to have risen for the fourth straight month to 4.3 per cent, stirring fears of a recession.
He and Vance buttressed their claims of Harris being a radical by dredging up her past assertions, mainly from her disastrous run for the 2016 party nomination by appealing to the party’s leftists.
Vance, who spoke at the start of the rally, made some of the same points but added elements of the divisive culture war.
He brought up the inclusion of sexually explicit books in schools, allowing men to use women’s and girls’ bathrooms, and transgender people in women’s sports, asserting they would be reversed under Trump.
Under criticism for disparaging statements about women, such as calling women without children “Cat Ladies”, he spoke of strong women in his life his “Mawmaw” -- the maternal grandmother -- who raised him and was a no-nonsense figure who kept him on the straight path.
At the rally in Atlanta, a city with nearly half the population of African Americans, Trump and Vance made a play for support from that community that overwhelmingly is Democrat.
Trump mentioned the presence at the rally of Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King, the iconic leader of the civil rights movement from Atlanta, and interrupted his speech to let an admiring African American woman break to ask for support from the community.
(Arul Louis can be contacted at [email protected] and followed at @arulouis)
