President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have sharpened their rhetoric against Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee has courted women voters — even while he still defends the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Harris and Trump have built their weeks around targeting key voting blocs and visiting crucial swing states, as the race enters a 20-day sprint with no clear front-runner. With both candidates looking to ignite their stalled campaigns, as neither opens national or battleground leads outside polls’ margins of error, each has ramped up attacks on the other.
Team Harris has circled back to dire warnings about Trump threatening American democracy, using the federal government to punish his foes and being mostly interested in his own interests. The Trump camp, meanwhile, has seized on Harris medical records released by the White House to call on her to take a cognitive test and redoubled the contention that her policies would do little to pare illegal immigration.
Harris on Tuesday agreed with an interviewer that Donald Trump’s campaign is “about fascism.” Radio host Charlamagne tha God said of voters’ choice of Trump, “The other is about fascism, why can’t we just say that?” Harris replied: “Yes, we can say that.”
The Democratic nominee, appearing with the popular radio host as she tries to shore up the Black vote, contended Trump is trying to sell “fear” and is “weak.”
“I do believe he is a threat to our democracy. I do believe he is unfit, and I believe he’s unstable, and I think many people believe that,” she said of Trump.
But with the latest polls showing the nominees essentially in a dead heat in the seven up-for-grab states that should decide the winner, Harris might have tapped out the number of folks in her camp who “believe that.”
Biden, speaking Tuesday evening at a campaign event in Philadelphia, also went hard at Trump, casting Harris as a new kind of leader and Trump as a cultural rewind button who uses rhetoric that is “sick.”
“Kamala’s perspective on our problems will be fresh and new. Donald Trump’s perspective is old and failed and quite frankly totally dishonest,” Biden said, later doing something he has rarely done: directly alluding to Trump’s legal issues.
“So far, he hasn’t been sentenced. … I want to watch that sentence. … I think he’s running to stay out of jail,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s conviction and delayed sentencing in a criminal hush money trial in New York.
“Trump hides all his racism, now it’s all out front. He has the same ideas on race as the 1930s,” Biden said. “Trump’s ideas on the economy are from the [1920s]. Trump’s ideas on women are from the [1950s].”
The Democratic duo spoke one day before Harris was set to venture into Trump Country with an early prime-time interview on Fox News with host Bret Baier, as her campaign senses some moderate Republicans and independent viewers, including women, could pick her on Election Day.
But the pair’s tougher talk does not mean there haven’t been some awkward and uneven moments.
One came when Charlamagne tha God posed one of the many pointed questions he and his listeners asked Harris during an hour-long sit-down: “So why is everybody sitting around acting like Donald Trump isn’t going to plan to steal this election if he loses? Like, you know, Republican officials won’t certify the results of the election. We know it’s Donald Trump’s Supreme Court. Why are people acting like this is going to be a free and fair election and he won’t try to steal it?”
Harris appeared taken off guard, replying at first with the kind of so-called “word salad” over which Republicans have criticized her: “So it will be a free and fair election if we, the American people, stand up for that. … Democracy has, it’s like two points of nature. One, there’s a fact about a democracy that when it is intact, it — the strength that it possesses in terms of the protection of people’s individual rights and liberties.”
She rebounded, launching back into a direct attack on Trump and an appeal to women voters: “The man has told you he intends to terminate the Constitution. The man has told you all these things about his disregard and disrespect for your freedoms and liberty, including the right of a woman to make decisions about her own body.”
‘You have the exceptions’
Trump has conducted a number of interviews and town halls in recent months, but he mostly has stuck to friendly media figures, former aides or allied lawmakers and governors to lead the questioning.
During a Fox News town hall with Harris Faulkner — who opened by saying she is “rolling with” Trump — taped in Georgia on Tuesday that aired Wednesday morning, a single mother who lives there but was originally from California asked Trump a rare pointed question: “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”
Trump — who later did not answer directly when Faulkner asked what he thought he could get through Congress on immigration — began with his own gaffe, distorting the views of legal scholars on federal abortion rights.
“For 52 years, this issue has torn our country apart. Every legal scholar, the great ones, every lawyer, but the Democrats, the Republicans, the liberals and conservatives, they wanted it brought out of the federal government and brought back to the states for a vote of the people,” he falsely said, before making what amounted to his own appeal to women voters.
“And, like Ronald Reagan, I believe in the exceptions for rape, incest, life of the mother. I strongly believe, you know, you have to follow your heart,” Trump added. “Some people don’t. It’s a very small percentage, but you have to follow your heart. But you have the exceptions.”
But in a moment that captured his struggle on the issue, Trump — speaking to an audience composed of only women — could not resist taking credit for the Supreme Court’s blockbuster 2022 decision to end federal abortion protections.
“But with what we were able to do is through, really, the courage of six Supreme Court justices,” he told the women, “we were able to do this after years and years of turmoil.”
The boast underscored a sizable gender gap in most polls, including a recent NBC News survey that showed Harris leading among women voters by a 14-point margin (55 percent to 41 percent). But in a microcosm of the race, the same poll put Trump ahead among men by 16 percentage points (56 percent to 40 percent).
He did get rousing applause from the all-female audience when he appeared to float signing an executive order, if elected, to prohibit athletes who have transitioned from participating in women’s sports.
“The president bans it, and you stop it,” Trump vowed — though he did not address the inevitable legal challenges that would follow. The statement was in line with the muscular executive branch he has proposed on the campaign trail.
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