Tonight in Erie, Pa., Kamala Harris is planning to warn voters about the risks of a second Donald Trump administration, according to a campaign official’s summary of her prepared remarks. She will cast her opponent as an unhinged man who is seeking unchecked power to get revenge on his detractors and control people’s lives.
To drive this point home in the final stretch of the race, the Harris-Walz campaign is also releasing a new ad that features former Trump White House national-security aides Olivia Troye and Kevin Carroll warning about the “danger” of a second Trump administration. “I do remember the day that he suggested that we shoot people on the streets,” Troye says in the ad. Adds Carroll: “A second term would be worse. There will be no one to stop his worst instincts. Unchecked power. No guardrails. If we elect Trump again, we’re in terrible danger.”
The ad includes clips of Trump railing against the “enemy from within.” (One of those clips came from an answer to a question posed by Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo about whether he anticipates “chaos” on November 5. Pressed on “outside agitators” and “people on the terrorist watch list,” Trump said: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and [are] destroying our country. . . . We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. . . . It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”)
The vice president’s campaign speech tonight in Erie will mark a continuation of the steadiness-versus-chaos theme she struck in her Democratic convention speech in Chicago back in August. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United states. Not to improve your life, not to strengthen national security,” she told the convention crowd, “but to serve the only client he has ever had — himself.”
Harris’s strategy is an offshoot of Joe Biden’s democracy-versus-chaos approach to the race that sought to cast Trump as a threat to American institutions. This strategy may be falling flat against a candidate who has now survived multiple attempts on his life. Three weeks out from Election Day, is this what swing-county voters want to hear?