On Wednesday afternoon Kamala Harris was at the vice-presidential residence in Washington DC delivering a brief but scathing speech about her Republican opponent in the presidential election.
Describing Trump as “ever more mentally ill”, she quoted critical remarks from John Kelly, Trump’s ex-White House chief of staff, to the New York Times.
The vice-president paraphrased Kelly pointing to Trump as a man who ‘certainly falls into the general definition of fascists’ and who has mentioned Hitler approvingly several times.
She accused her rival of seeking “unchecked power” and in a CNN town hall event was asked directly whether she considered him a “fascist”. “Yes, I do,” she replied.
Within an hour of the town hall concluding, Trump took to X and Truth Social and wroteации that Harris’s remarks were evidence that she was on her way out. He said she was “escalating aggression, which includes referring to him as Adolf Hitler and anything else that she considers in her sinister mind.”
In the last months of political campaigns – especially in one like the 2024 presidential race – anger and negativity are bound to come out, regardless of which side is leading.
It is evident that attacks are more likely to mobilise the supporters in order to vote and to intervene with the other campaigns.
For Harris, however, the harder line taken towards Trump negates the joyful and positive image she sought to portray in her campaign at the beginning.
While she did caution at the Democratic convention of a Trump presidency without the guardrails, Harris mostly shied away from Biden’s central campaign theme that Trump was a clear and present danger to the American experiment.
As political strategist Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way points out, however, it is obvious why Harris was first to tweet this time about Kelly’s grim portrayal of Trump as an authoritarian.
“The things she does now are all strategic,” he said. “The imperative was to ensure as many voters as possible are informed of what Kelly said.”
The vice-presidents latest comments come as her campaign enters its second month of strategizing how to sway independent voters and moderate Republicans who could potentially vote for the Democrats in the November election.
According to other polls, the gap between the two rivals is very slim and none is seen to be leading in any of the swing states.
Suburban vote-rich areas around the largest cities in swing states like, say, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Phoenix, are filled with college-educated, professional ‘Reagan Democrats’ who do not appear keen on returning Trump to the White House, survey data suggests.
Her explanation of how she wins this thing is to try to get as big a coalition as she can and to take over disaffected Republicans – people who just don’t feel they can vote for Trump again, Mr Bennett stated.
Devynn DeVelasco, a 20-year-old independent from Nebraska, is one of those who had already been convinced by the long list of senior Republicans who worked for then-President Trump but now say he is unfit for this post.
While she would like some Republicans to support her with Harris, she believes there is burn out on the accusations leveled against the former president.
Republican strategist Denise Grace Gitsham said the voters had heard such allegations about Trump since the 2016 campaign, meaning that nothing new could change their mind.
If you are voting against Donald Trump because you do not like his personality then you are a decided voter she told the BBC.
“But if you’re one of those people who are paying attention to the policies and that is important to you than the feeling that you get from a personality, then you’re going to go with the person that you felt you fared better under while he was in office.”
Harris and Trump have recently been honing their digs. In a series of campaign speeches in four Midwestern states on Monday, Harris threatened that Trump administration would roll back women access to abortion, seek to revoke the Affordable Health Care Act, destabilize the economy, and shift the US foreign policy.
On Friday she will be holding a rally in Texas – the state she has said embodies most vividly the anti-abortion future that awaits if Trump returns.
The next Tuesday she will turn her attention to Washington, DC, for a rally that is said to have been organised by the National Mall where Trump addressed some of his supporters before they stormed the US Capitol.
Trump, on the other hand, has not stopped his criticism of his Democratic counterpart. Speaking at a town hall in North Carolina he stated that Harris was lazy and stupid and became her party nominee only because of the color of her skin and her sex.
He also gave his own words of caution and said that ‘‘we may not even have a country anymore’’, although he did not mention Harris by name.
None of these lines looks like a deviation for Trump, though, as he has spent most of the campaign being focused on Democrats and sticking to usual playbook on immigration, trade and the economy.
Harris’s closing message to undecided anti-Trump Republicans and Independents, however, is not without its hazards, according to Bennett, a Democratic strategist.
They kept saying ‘You are always shorting one thing to try to help promote something else’ he said. Time of the candidate and the time for advertising are two most valuable products.” And how you spend those matters.
Trump has been a polarising figure in American politics for more than eight years now. Almost everyone with a pulse has formed a very clear and quite vivid impression about the man by the time this is being written.
If anti-Trump feeling carry Harris by election, then her latest focus area would have been the payoff. If not, then people will start second guessing as fast as the speed of light.
