As Audrey reported earlier, this evening Vice President Kamala Harris will address the country from the Ellipse on the National Mall, giving her “closing argument” that Donald Trump “has an enemies list of people he intends to prosecute. . . . Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him. People he calls ‘the enemy from within.’ This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better.”
Harris is expected to go on to call Trump “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.”
And, of course, Harris will be delivering these remarks in the same spot where Trump held his “stop the steal” rally on January 6, 2021.
Your mileage may vary, but this feels . . . very paint-by-numbers. If you deem Trump’s actions leading up to and on January 6 as unacceptable, you’re probably not voting for Trump and probably never considered it. The problem for Harris and other Democrats is that roughly half the electorate, both nationally and in the swing states, do not find January 6 disqualifying or a strong reason to vote against Trump.
I suppose you could interpret Harris’s decision to spend the last Tuesday before Election Day in Washington, D.C. — and her current unwillingness to sit for a whole three-hour show with Joe Rogan — as a sign of confidence. (I don’t begrudge the candidates for leaving those big seven swing states every now and then; Trump, Harris, Vance, and Walz have crisscrossed those states plenty of times by now, and nobody is just one more Bucks County rally away from locking this thing up.) Washington, D.C., and Maryland are the deepest of blue territories, and Virginia doesn’t look all that competitive either. This is not about the location; this is about the message that Harris has decided will be most resonant from coast to coast.
But it’s just hard to believe that the deadlock the polls keep showing us is going to be broken by one more high-profile “Trump is a dangerous demagogue” speech. The Biden campaign was convinced that this was the right approach, too. Biden warned about “ultra-MAGA” Republicans in his big Independence Hall speech, and he warned that MAGA was a threat to democracy in 2023, and he warned that Trump was out for “revenge” in his speech to the NAACP in May, and he warned about Trump’s “retribution” at his big Hollywood fundraiser in June . . .
. . . and Harris already gave a speech on this theme when accepting her party’s nomination.
His explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents and anyone he sees as the enemy. His explicit intent to deploy our active duty military against our own citizens. Consider, consider the power he will have, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution. 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 our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.
And then in the debate:
Understand, this is someone who has openly said he would terminate, I’m quoting, terminate the constitution of the United States. That he would weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies. Someone who has openly expressed disdain for members of our military. Understand what it would mean if Donald Trump were back in the white house with no guardrails. Because certainly, we know now the court won’t stop him. We know JD Vance is not going to stop him. It’s up to the American people to stop him.
If this message was sufficient, if this was what it took to beat Trump, then never mind Harris: Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 presidential race.