Josh Marcus
Tue 29 October 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign claimed she drew a crowd of more than 75,000 people in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to hear her speech at the Ellipse, the site of Donald Trump’s infamous 2021 speech exhorting supporters to “fight like hell” in the moments just before the January 6 Capitol riot.
If its own early estimate is to be believed, the Harris event drew about 22,000 more people than the Trump speech, whose crowd was estimated by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot to be about 53,000 people.
Trump routinely exaggerates his crowd, with January 6 2021 being no exception. He has claimed that he had as many people in attendance that day as Martin Luther King Jr attracted for his “I Have a Dream” speech near the Lincoln Memorial, on August 28 1968.
Estimates suggest King’s crowd was actually closer to 250,000 – about five times as big as Trump’s on January 6.
Speaking at the Ellipse, a park between the White House and the National Mall, Harris sought to paint a clear contrast between herself and her Republican opponent and offer a “closing argument” to voters.
“America, we know what Donald Trump has in mind. More chaos. More division. And policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else. I offer a different path. And I ask for your vote,” Harris told the crowd.
“And here is my pledge to you: I pledge to seek common ground and common sense solutions to make your lives better,” she added. “I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”
The message could not be more different than Trump’s speech at the site, where he made false claims about the election and railed against Republicans who would not go along with his plan to halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 win.
Kamala Harris addressed supporters on October 29 at the Ellipse, the site of Donald Trump’s infamous 2021 speech just before the Capitol riot (Getty Images)
Though Trump told supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard, the Republican also used the speech to pressure his vice president, Mike Pence, to suspend the certification and called on MAGA fans to “fight like hell” to preserve their country.
“We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he told the crowd, as he repeated false claims that the election had been stolen from him.
He told the crowd: “And by the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It’s a disgrace. There’s never been anything like that. You could take third-world countries. Just take a look. Take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we’ve been going through in this country. It’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace.”
Trump has claimed speech telling supporters to fight to challenge election results in moments before Capitol riot was part of day of ‘love and peace’ (Getty Images)
According to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson during the January 6 hearings, Trump had reason to believe some of the crowd were armed. She said he wanted the magnetometers being used to check for weapons taken away so that the crowd would fill up more quickly.
“I don’t f***ing care that they have weapons,” Trump said according to Hutchinson. “They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f***ing mags away.”
Trump is facing federal criminal charges in Washington for his attempts to subvert his 2020 loss.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump has taken to describing the events surrounding January 6 as non-violent, refering to the day as a “peaceful transfer of power” and a day of “love and peace.”
The change agent v the tyrant: Harris’s big speech focuses on Trump
David Smith in Washington
Lauren Gambino in Washington
COLLEEN LONG and DAN MERICA
Tue 29 October 2024
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks during a campaign event at the Ellipse near the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Kamala Harris on Tuesday sought to remind Americans what life was like under Donald Trump and then offered voters a different path forward if they send her to the White House, in a speech billed as her campaign's closing argument.
“I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me,” she said, speaking before a massive crowd that spilled from the grassy Ellipse near the White House to the Washington Monument.
Some key moments from her half-hour speech:
The location of the speech reinforced her message
Harris chose to speak from the Ellipse on purpose. It's the same spot in Washington where Republican Donald Trump helped incite a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But the vice president didn't devote much of her speech to the violence of that day, instead using the field between Constitution Avenue and the White House more as a backdrop — a quiet reminder of the different choices Americans face.
“Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other," she said, adding that he wants back into the White House “not to focus on your problems, but to focus on his.”
Kamala Harris, the prosecutor, argued her case
Harris spent years working as a prosecutor. She was California's attorney general before she became a U.S. senator. And she often says on the campaign trail that she's only ever had one client — the people. In her speech, she talked about her past work taking on scammers, violent offenders who abused women and children, and cartels that trafficked in guns and human beings.
She said she'd bring with her to the White House an instinct to protect.
“There’s something about people being treated unfairly, or overlooked, that just gets to me," she said.
It's me, Hi. I'm the presidential nominee. It's me.
One week before the election, Harris allowed that “I know many of you are still getting to know who I am.”
The Democratic nominee has been running for only three months in a compressed campaign launched after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. Harris still is confronting voters who say they want to learn more about her and how she will govern. So she spent some time Tuesday talking about her career, her goals and background.
“I’ll be honest with you: I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. But here’s what I promise you: I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me."
To-do list for Day One at the White House
Harris devoted a good chunk of her speech to talking about policies she'd enact if she were to win the White House, including helping first-time homeowners with down payments and aiding the so-called “sandwich generation" of adults who are caring for young children and older parents by allowing elder care to be funded by Medicare. She said she'd work to pass a bipartisan border security bill that tanked last year after Trump encouraged congressional Republicans to let it die.
And she said she would work to bring back abortion protections. “I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court justice took away from the women of America,” Harris said. The Supreme Court, with three Trump-appointed justices, overturned federal protections of abortion in 2022. Abortion has since become one of the most motivating issues for the Democratic base in the 2024 election.
“On Day One, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she said. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
Size matters on the campaign trail — especially to Trump
The Ellipse is a grassy expanse between the White House and the Washington Monument that has long played host to political events and national traditions like the annual holiday tree lighting. On Tuesday, the space was packed. Crowds spilled onto the National Mall back toward the Washington Monument, where giant screens and speakers were set up for people to hear and see from afar.
The cheers of the boisterous crowd could be heard from the White House driveway. Harris' campaign said it was her biggest rally to date. She's already packed stadiums and other venues with supporters during her rallies. Harris loves to needle Trump about crowd size — a particular preoccupation for the Republican leader, who claimed the campaign had to bus people in Tuesday to fill the space.
Harris has called Trump ‘unhinged’ and ‘unstable.’ Now she's adding ‘petty tyrant’
Harris boiled down criticism of Trump into two words: "petty tyrant."
She warned Trump is a man governed by grievances, one who would focus on himself and his “enemies list” when he got into the White House. She harked back to the nation's founding when Americans fought for freedom, then sped through decades of hard-fought civil rights battles.
“They did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms. They didn't do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant," she said. "These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
Meanwhile, a Biden complication emerges
Just moments before Harris was to speak, Biden was on a campaign call reacting to a comic who called Puerto Rico garbage during a Trump rally last weekend. The president said, "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
He’d joined a national call organized by the advocacy group Voto Latino. Biden urged those on the call to “vote to keep Donald Trump out of the White House," adding, “He’s a true danger to not just Latinos but to all people."
Biden's remarks were quicky seized on by Republicans who said he was denigrating Trump supporters, a distraction for Harris when she is trying to reach out to GOP voters.
Biden quickly sent out a social media post seeking to clarify his remarks.
“His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable," Biden said of Trump. “That’s all I meant to say.”
There's still plenty to come after what Harris called her ‘closing argument’
The event was framed as a campaign finale meant to lay out in stark terms the choice for voters next week. But it's far from Harris' last campaign event. She'll be hitting all the key battleground states as she makes her last pitch to voters.
She will headline events in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania on Wednesday, and on Thursday she will have rallies in Arizona and Nevada. More events are expected before Election Day.
The campaign is looking to pick up voters across many different demographics in the hope that a swing vote here and there may add up to a win in a razor's-edge race with Trump.
Kamala Harris Likens Trump to Mad ‘Petty Tyrant’ King George
Mini Racker
Tue 29 October 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech on the National Mall.
WASHINGTON—Kamala Harris made her presidential bid’s “closing argument” Tuesday night, warning an electrified crowd of tens of thousands that Donald Trump is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.”
She alluded to Trump’s recent threats to use the U.S. military against Americans who disagree with him, implicitly comparing her GOP opponent to King George III, the British monarch who suffered from mental illness and spoke loquaciously until foam ran out of his mouth.
“Nearly 250 years ago America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant,” she said at the Ellipse, a location loaded with symbolism.
The Harris campaign estimated that 75,000 supporters flocked to the National Mall for Kamala Harris' final major campaign speech.
The Ellipse is where Trump, on Jan. 6, 2021, riled up his followers to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president. The expansive lawn on the National Mall sits just behind the White House, where Harris hopes to live come January.
“Americans died as a result of that attack,” Harris said, noting that as the violence unfolded on television that day, Trump’s response to his staff describing how protesters wanted to kill Mike Pence was reportedly, “So what?”
With the White House behind her, Harris said one of Trump’s “highest priorities is to set free the violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers on January 6th.”
Douglas Emhoff, and potential future first gentleman, was front and center for his wife's speech.
The Metropolitan Police Department originally expected 20,000 attendees at the Ellipse, but that number ballooned to more than 52,000. More than 75,000 attended, a Harris campaign official told the Daily Beast, the largest crowd Harris has drawn this year.
“This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power, trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other,” Harris warned Tuesday night. “That is who he is.”
Her aspirational speech was also laden with policy as she recapped her campaign promises to give tax cuts to middle-class families and entrepreneurs, protect and expand affordable health care, make housing affordable and—an issue paramount to her campaign—make abortion legal nationally and fight “Trump abortion bans” at the state level.
Kamala Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, the second gentleman, embrace on stage.
The speech marked the beginning of the end of a whirlwind three-month campaign. Harris’ entrance into the race after Biden stepped aside sparked wild enthusiasm among Democrats, and though she insisted she’s the “underdog,” her party was riding high for months.
But in the final weeks of the campaign, the Democratic candidate’s apparent lead over Trump has slipped, leaving them deadlocked in the polls just days away from Election Day.
A sense of deflation mingled with signs of hope in the shadows of the Washington Monument Tuesday night. Audience members who spoke to the Daily Beast said that they were hopeful Harris would defeat Trump, but few were confident, even though they streamed like a pilgrimage to the Ellipse to witness history.
Supporters wait for Kamala Harris to take the stage for her final major speech before Election Day.
Inside the security barriers, attendees waved American flags. Outside the fences, throngs of people looked on, with the crowd stretching past the Washington Monument and out of sight.
Harris urged everyone who came to vote on Tuesday.
“I’ve lived the Promise of America,” she said. “I see the Promise of America in all of you.”
David Smith in Washington
THE GUARDIAN
Tue 29 October 2024
Kamala Harris on the Ellipse on 29 October 2024 in Washington DC.Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Whither the politics of joy? Kamala Harris’s solid if unspectacular closing argument for why she should be elected US president was not about Kamala Harris. It was first and foremost about Donald Trump.
The Democratic nominee’s big speech in Washington mentioned Trump by name 24 times and Joe Biden only once. It confirmed that, even when Trump is not commander-in-chief, he still commands the American psyche.
A week before election day, Harris chose her venue carefully: the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House. Trump “stood at this very spot nearly four years ago”, she noted, adding that he sent an armed mob to the US Capitol to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
A very different, more diverse, larger crowd – some estimated 75,000 – gathered here on Tuesday, basking in unseasonal afternoon heat, wrapping against an evening chill. They waved “USA” signs and the stars and stripes and wore wristbands glowing blue or red. They chanted “Kamala! Kamala!” and “We’re not going back!” They were surrounded by great symbols of the republic: the Washington monument, the Jefferson memorial, the White House itself.
Speaking at a lectern behind protective glass, Harris went on to warn of Trump’s enemies list and intention to turn the military against those who disagree with him. “This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better,” she said. “This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.”
The vice-president went on to sketch out some of her own biography as a prosecutor and law enforcement officer fighting for the people. Yet somehow the argument again came back to the Republican nominee. “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she said. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
It was a far cry from the start of the Harris candidacy, which launched with joyous euphoria and her running mate Tim Walz branding Trump and his allies “weird”. That felt like a refreshing tonic after years of anxiety and misery in the Trump era. At the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia, speaker after speaker mocked Trump and made him seem small (Barack Obama even parodied his manhood).
Notably, even then, Harris began to adopt a more serious tone about the threat he poses, and in recent weeks she embraced former Trump officials’ use of “fascist” to underline his authoritarian ambitions, though she did not deploy that word here. His rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, and its echoes of a pro-Nazi rally that took place there in 1939, provided more fodder.
There is some political logic to this choice: make the election a referendum on Trump rather than Harris; make him seem like the incumbent and Harris the change agent. “It is time to turn the page on the drama and conflict, the fear and division,” she said. “It is time for a new generation of leadership in America.”
That would explain why she has sought to distance herself from Biden and is reportedly brushing off his offers to campaign for her. Although her Tuesday rally in Washington was Bidenesque in its dire warnings about the Trump threat, it used the president’s favoured word, “democracy”, only once. Instead, the word “freedom” was spelled out on three giant blue banners, along with “USA”.
Some Democrats are also eager for Harris to separate herself from Biden on the issue of the war in Gaza. A protester was led away shouting: “Stop arming Israel! Arms embargo now!” But Harris did not throw a bone to the peace movement during her remarks.
Whereas Biden used to tout job growth and economic good news, Harris again offered some practical promises: tax cuts for working people and the middle class, the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on groceries, a cap on the price of insulin and help for first-time home buyers.
These were important things that ought to win votes. But they were not accompanied by a grand vision. Mario Cuomo’s old adage was campaign in poetry, govern in prose, but there was not a great deal of soaring rhetoric in Harris’s address. A decade of Trump had been bad for the soul.
The vice-president did deliver a memorable image towards the end, however, recalling how, nearly 250 years, America wrested itself free from a petty tyrant (British monarch George III) and how generations of Americans have preserved that freedom. “They did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” she said. “The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
Then, from fear, a pivot to hope: “The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised. A nation big enough to encompass all our dreams. Strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us. And fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.”
Doug Emhoff joined Harris on stage with a hug and a kiss as the crowd cheered. Next Tuesday, they will be back in Washington for the most nail-biting presidential election since George W Bush v Al Gore in 2000. They will be hoping this Democratic vice-president fares better than Gore did. A wafer-thin margin of a few thousand votes in a swing state or two may determine whether Harris’s closing argument looks like strategic genius or a catastrophic miscalculation.
She told the crowd: “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That’s who he is. But America, I am here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.”
The phrase “this is not who we are” has been used often in the Trump era. Sometimes the evidence says otherwise. Next week, the country will find out who we really ar
Kamala Harris calls for a ‘new generation of leadership’ in Washington speech
Tue 29 October 2024
Kamala Harris on the Ellipse on 29 October 2024 in Washington DC.Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Whither the politics of joy? Kamala Harris’s solid if unspectacular closing argument for why she should be elected US president was not about Kamala Harris. It was first and foremost about Donald Trump.
The Democratic nominee’s big speech in Washington mentioned Trump by name 24 times and Joe Biden only once. It confirmed that, even when Trump is not commander-in-chief, he still commands the American psyche.
A week before election day, Harris chose her venue carefully: the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House. Trump “stood at this very spot nearly four years ago”, she noted, adding that he sent an armed mob to the US Capitol to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
A very different, more diverse, larger crowd – some estimated 75,000 – gathered here on Tuesday, basking in unseasonal afternoon heat, wrapping against an evening chill. They waved “USA” signs and the stars and stripes and wore wristbands glowing blue or red. They chanted “Kamala! Kamala!” and “We’re not going back!” They were surrounded by great symbols of the republic: the Washington monument, the Jefferson memorial, the White House itself.
Speaking at a lectern behind protective glass, Harris went on to warn of Trump’s enemies list and intention to turn the military against those who disagree with him. “This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better,” she said. “This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.”
The vice-president went on to sketch out some of her own biography as a prosecutor and law enforcement officer fighting for the people. Yet somehow the argument again came back to the Republican nominee. “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she said. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
It was a far cry from the start of the Harris candidacy, which launched with joyous euphoria and her running mate Tim Walz branding Trump and his allies “weird”. That felt like a refreshing tonic after years of anxiety and misery in the Trump era. At the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia, speaker after speaker mocked Trump and made him seem small (Barack Obama even parodied his manhood).
Notably, even then, Harris began to adopt a more serious tone about the threat he poses, and in recent weeks she embraced former Trump officials’ use of “fascist” to underline his authoritarian ambitions, though she did not deploy that word here. His rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, and its echoes of a pro-Nazi rally that took place there in 1939, provided more fodder.
There is some political logic to this choice: make the election a referendum on Trump rather than Harris; make him seem like the incumbent and Harris the change agent. “It is time to turn the page on the drama and conflict, the fear and division,” she said. “It is time for a new generation of leadership in America.”
That would explain why she has sought to distance herself from Biden and is reportedly brushing off his offers to campaign for her. Although her Tuesday rally in Washington was Bidenesque in its dire warnings about the Trump threat, it used the president’s favoured word, “democracy”, only once. Instead, the word “freedom” was spelled out on three giant blue banners, along with “USA”.
Some Democrats are also eager for Harris to separate herself from Biden on the issue of the war in Gaza. A protester was led away shouting: “Stop arming Israel! Arms embargo now!” But Harris did not throw a bone to the peace movement during her remarks.
Whereas Biden used to tout job growth and economic good news, Harris again offered some practical promises: tax cuts for working people and the middle class, the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on groceries, a cap on the price of insulin and help for first-time home buyers.
These were important things that ought to win votes. But they were not accompanied by a grand vision. Mario Cuomo’s old adage was campaign in poetry, govern in prose, but there was not a great deal of soaring rhetoric in Harris’s address. A decade of Trump had been bad for the soul.
The vice-president did deliver a memorable image towards the end, however, recalling how, nearly 250 years, America wrested itself free from a petty tyrant (British monarch George III) and how generations of Americans have preserved that freedom. “They did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” she said. “The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
Then, from fear, a pivot to hope: “The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised. A nation big enough to encompass all our dreams. Strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us. And fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.”
Doug Emhoff joined Harris on stage with a hug and a kiss as the crowd cheered. Next Tuesday, they will be back in Washington for the most nail-biting presidential election since George W Bush v Al Gore in 2000. They will be hoping this Democratic vice-president fares better than Gore did. A wafer-thin margin of a few thousand votes in a swing state or two may determine whether Harris’s closing argument looks like strategic genius or a catastrophic miscalculation.
She told the crowd: “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That’s who he is. But America, I am here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.”
The phrase “this is not who we are” has been used often in the Trump era. Sometimes the evidence says otherwise. Next week, the country will find out who we really ar
Kamala Harris calls for a ‘new generation of leadership’ in Washington speech
Lauren Gambino in Washington
THE GUARDIAN
Tue 29 October 2024
Kamala Harris makes her ‘closing argument’ in Washington on Tuesday.
With the White House illuminated behind her, Kamala Harris asked the vanishing slice of undecided Americans to elect a “new generation of leadership”, likening Donald Trump to a “petty tyrant” who had stood in the very same spot nearly four years ago and, in a last-gasp effort to cling to power, helped incite the mob that stormed the US Capitol.
The choice between her and Trump in the deadlocked presidential contest was “about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division”, Harris said, from the Ellipse near the White House’s South Lawn, where tens of thousands of supporters gathered one week before the final votes of the 2024 election are cast.
“I ask for your vote,” she told the crowd, which spilled beyond the park, toward the Washington monument, and the many more watching at home.
In a speech her, campaign billed as the former prosecutor’s “closing argument” with the American people as her jury, Harris repeatedly gestured behind her as she described the progress she hoped to make as the 47th president of the United States on lowering prices, protecting abortion rights and addressing immigration.
“In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office,” she said as the crowd – which the campaign placed at 75,000 – erupted into chants of “Kamala! Kamala!” “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she continued. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
The oval-shaped park also served as reminder of Trump’s actions on January 6, when he exhorted his followers to “fight like hell” and walk to the Capitol where Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Aggrieved and “obsessed with revenge”, Trump was “out for unchecked power” , Harris warned, charging that he would spend the next four years focused on his problems, not the country’s.
Although Harris framed the stakes of the 2024 election as nothing less than the preservation of US democracy, she sought to offer an optimistic and hopeful tone, in stark contrast to the dark, racist themes that animated Trump’s grievance-fueled rally at Madison Square Garden. Harris called on Americans to “turn the page” on the Trump era and “start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told”. Americans had forgotten, she said, that “it doesn’t have to be this way”.
From his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida earlier on Tuesday, Trump waved off criticism of the rally, calling it an “absolute love fest”.
The daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, Harris recalled attending civil rights marches with her parents as a toddler and the memory of her mother, “a cup of tea in hand”, poring over bills at the kitchen table.
“I’ve lived the promise of America,” Harris said, and without an explicit reference to the history-making nature of her candidacy, she grounded it in a fight for “freedom” that has propelled generations of “patriots” from Normandy to Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall.
“They did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” she said, her voice building as she declared: “The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
In recent days, Harris has amplified warnings of her opponent’s lurch toward authoritarianism and open xenophobia. Her campaign is running ads highlighting John Kelly, a marine general and Trump’s former chief of staff, saying that Trump met the definition of a fascist. Harris has said she agrees.
Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts
In her remarks, Harris attempted to balance the existential and the economic – focusing on the threat Trump poses to US institutions while weaving in her plans to bring down prices and build up the middle class. She portrayed Trump as a tool of the billionaire class who would eliminate what is left of abortion access and stand in the way of bipartisan compromise when it does not suit him politically.
Responding to her Ellipse speech, a Trump campaign spokesperson accused the vice-president of “lying, name-calling, and clinging to the past”.
Polls show the contest between Trump and Harris virtually tied in the seven battleground states like to decide the presidential election.
Trump has sought to rewrite the history of January 6, the culmination of his attempt to cling to power that resulted in the first occupation of the US Capitol since British forces set it on fire during the war of 1812. Trump recently declared the attack a “day of love” and said he would pardon the January 6 rioters – whom he has called “patriots” and “hostages” – if he is elected president.
Hundreds of supporters have been convicted and imprisoned for their conduct at the Capitol, while federal prosecutors have accused Trump of coordinating an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Trump maintains that he played no role in stoking the violence that unfolded, and still claims baselessly that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
In a press call on Tuesday morning, Harris’s campaigned expressed a bullishness about her prospects. “We know that there are still a lot of voters out there that are still trying to decide who to support or whether to vote at all,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign’s chair, told reporters before her remarks on Tuesday. She said many Americans were “exhausted” by the tribalism and polarization Trump has sharpened since his political rise in 2016.
In an abbreviated 100-day campaign that Harris inherited from Biden after he stepped aside in July, the Democratic nominee has unified her party, raised more than $1bn, blanketed the airwaves and blitzed the battleground states. And yet the race remains a dead heat nationally and in the seven swing states that will determine who wins the White House.
After her speech, Harris will return to the campaign trail, where she will keep a frenetic pace ahead of what her campaign has called a “margin-of-error election”.
“We see very good signs for us across the battleground states, in particular in the blue wall,” O’Malley Dillon said on the Tuesday morning call, referring to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Harris has barnstormed in recent weeks. “And we see that we’re on pace to win a very close election.”
A to-do list, size matters and a 'petty tyrant': Key moments from Kamala Harris' speech
Tue 29 October 2024
Kamala Harris makes her ‘closing argument’ in Washington on Tuesday.
With the White House illuminated behind her, Kamala Harris asked the vanishing slice of undecided Americans to elect a “new generation of leadership”, likening Donald Trump to a “petty tyrant” who had stood in the very same spot nearly four years ago and, in a last-gasp effort to cling to power, helped incite the mob that stormed the US Capitol.
The choice between her and Trump in the deadlocked presidential contest was “about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division”, Harris said, from the Ellipse near the White House’s South Lawn, where tens of thousands of supporters gathered one week before the final votes of the 2024 election are cast.
“I ask for your vote,” she told the crowd, which spilled beyond the park, toward the Washington monument, and the many more watching at home.
In a speech her, campaign billed as the former prosecutor’s “closing argument” with the American people as her jury, Harris repeatedly gestured behind her as she described the progress she hoped to make as the 47th president of the United States on lowering prices, protecting abortion rights and addressing immigration.
“In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office,” she said as the crowd – which the campaign placed at 75,000 – erupted into chants of “Kamala! Kamala!” “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she continued. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
The oval-shaped park also served as reminder of Trump’s actions on January 6, when he exhorted his followers to “fight like hell” and walk to the Capitol where Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Aggrieved and “obsessed with revenge”, Trump was “out for unchecked power” , Harris warned, charging that he would spend the next four years focused on his problems, not the country’s.
Although Harris framed the stakes of the 2024 election as nothing less than the preservation of US democracy, she sought to offer an optimistic and hopeful tone, in stark contrast to the dark, racist themes that animated Trump’s grievance-fueled rally at Madison Square Garden. Harris called on Americans to “turn the page” on the Trump era and “start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told”. Americans had forgotten, she said, that “it doesn’t have to be this way”.
From his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida earlier on Tuesday, Trump waved off criticism of the rally, calling it an “absolute love fest”.
The daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, Harris recalled attending civil rights marches with her parents as a toddler and the memory of her mother, “a cup of tea in hand”, poring over bills at the kitchen table.
“I’ve lived the promise of America,” Harris said, and without an explicit reference to the history-making nature of her candidacy, she grounded it in a fight for “freedom” that has propelled generations of “patriots” from Normandy to Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall.
“They did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” she said, her voice building as she declared: “The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
In recent days, Harris has amplified warnings of her opponent’s lurch toward authoritarianism and open xenophobia. Her campaign is running ads highlighting John Kelly, a marine general and Trump’s former chief of staff, saying that Trump met the definition of a fascist. Harris has said she agrees.
Don’t miss important US election coverage. Get our free app and sign up for election alerts
In her remarks, Harris attempted to balance the existential and the economic – focusing on the threat Trump poses to US institutions while weaving in her plans to bring down prices and build up the middle class. She portrayed Trump as a tool of the billionaire class who would eliminate what is left of abortion access and stand in the way of bipartisan compromise when it does not suit him politically.
Responding to her Ellipse speech, a Trump campaign spokesperson accused the vice-president of “lying, name-calling, and clinging to the past”.
Polls show the contest between Trump and Harris virtually tied in the seven battleground states like to decide the presidential election.
Trump has sought to rewrite the history of January 6, the culmination of his attempt to cling to power that resulted in the first occupation of the US Capitol since British forces set it on fire during the war of 1812. Trump recently declared the attack a “day of love” and said he would pardon the January 6 rioters – whom he has called “patriots” and “hostages” – if he is elected president.
Hundreds of supporters have been convicted and imprisoned for their conduct at the Capitol, while federal prosecutors have accused Trump of coordinating an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. Trump maintains that he played no role in stoking the violence that unfolded, and still claims baselessly that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
In a press call on Tuesday morning, Harris’s campaigned expressed a bullishness about her prospects. “We know that there are still a lot of voters out there that are still trying to decide who to support or whether to vote at all,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign’s chair, told reporters before her remarks on Tuesday. She said many Americans were “exhausted” by the tribalism and polarization Trump has sharpened since his political rise in 2016.
In an abbreviated 100-day campaign that Harris inherited from Biden after he stepped aside in July, the Democratic nominee has unified her party, raised more than $1bn, blanketed the airwaves and blitzed the battleground states. And yet the race remains a dead heat nationally and in the seven swing states that will determine who wins the White House.
After her speech, Harris will return to the campaign trail, where she will keep a frenetic pace ahead of what her campaign has called a “margin-of-error election”.
“We see very good signs for us across the battleground states, in particular in the blue wall,” O’Malley Dillon said on the Tuesday morning call, referring to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Harris has barnstormed in recent weeks. “And we see that we’re on pace to win a very close election.”
A to-do list, size matters and a 'petty tyrant': Key moments from Kamala Harris' speech
COLLEEN LONG and DAN MERICA
Tue 29 October 2024
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks during a campaign event at the Ellipse near the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Kamala Harris on Tuesday sought to remind Americans what life was like under Donald Trump and then offered voters a different path forward if they send her to the White House, in a speech billed as her campaign's closing argument.
“I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me,” she said, speaking before a massive crowd that spilled from the grassy Ellipse near the White House to the Washington Monument.
Some key moments from her half-hour speech:
The location of the speech reinforced her message
Harris chose to speak from the Ellipse on purpose. It's the same spot in Washington where Republican Donald Trump helped incite a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But the vice president didn't devote much of her speech to the violence of that day, instead using the field between Constitution Avenue and the White House more as a backdrop — a quiet reminder of the different choices Americans face.
“Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other," she said, adding that he wants back into the White House “not to focus on your problems, but to focus on his.”
Kamala Harris, the prosecutor, argued her case
Harris spent years working as a prosecutor. She was California's attorney general before she became a U.S. senator. And she often says on the campaign trail that she's only ever had one client — the people. In her speech, she talked about her past work taking on scammers, violent offenders who abused women and children, and cartels that trafficked in guns and human beings.
She said she'd bring with her to the White House an instinct to protect.
“There’s something about people being treated unfairly, or overlooked, that just gets to me," she said.
It's me, Hi. I'm the presidential nominee. It's me.
One week before the election, Harris allowed that “I know many of you are still getting to know who I am.”
The Democratic nominee has been running for only three months in a compressed campaign launched after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. Harris still is confronting voters who say they want to learn more about her and how she will govern. So she spent some time Tuesday talking about her career, her goals and background.
“I’ll be honest with you: I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. But here’s what I promise you: I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me."
To-do list for Day One at the White House
Harris devoted a good chunk of her speech to talking about policies she'd enact if she were to win the White House, including helping first-time homeowners with down payments and aiding the so-called “sandwich generation" of adults who are caring for young children and older parents by allowing elder care to be funded by Medicare. She said she'd work to pass a bipartisan border security bill that tanked last year after Trump encouraged congressional Republicans to let it die.
And she said she would work to bring back abortion protections. “I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court justice took away from the women of America,” Harris said. The Supreme Court, with three Trump-appointed justices, overturned federal protections of abortion in 2022. Abortion has since become one of the most motivating issues for the Democratic base in the 2024 election.
“On Day One, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she said. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
Size matters on the campaign trail — especially to Trump
The Ellipse is a grassy expanse between the White House and the Washington Monument that has long played host to political events and national traditions like the annual holiday tree lighting. On Tuesday, the space was packed. Crowds spilled onto the National Mall back toward the Washington Monument, where giant screens and speakers were set up for people to hear and see from afar.
The cheers of the boisterous crowd could be heard from the White House driveway. Harris' campaign said it was her biggest rally to date. She's already packed stadiums and other venues with supporters during her rallies. Harris loves to needle Trump about crowd size — a particular preoccupation for the Republican leader, who claimed the campaign had to bus people in Tuesday to fill the space.
Harris has called Trump ‘unhinged’ and ‘unstable.’ Now she's adding ‘petty tyrant’
Harris boiled down criticism of Trump into two words: "petty tyrant."
She warned Trump is a man governed by grievances, one who would focus on himself and his “enemies list” when he got into the White House. She harked back to the nation's founding when Americans fought for freedom, then sped through decades of hard-fought civil rights battles.
“They did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms. They didn't do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant," she said. "These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”
Meanwhile, a Biden complication emerges
Just moments before Harris was to speak, Biden was on a campaign call reacting to a comic who called Puerto Rico garbage during a Trump rally last weekend. The president said, "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
He’d joined a national call organized by the advocacy group Voto Latino. Biden urged those on the call to “vote to keep Donald Trump out of the White House," adding, “He’s a true danger to not just Latinos but to all people."
Biden's remarks were quicky seized on by Republicans who said he was denigrating Trump supporters, a distraction for Harris when she is trying to reach out to GOP voters.
Biden quickly sent out a social media post seeking to clarify his remarks.
“His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable," Biden said of Trump. “That’s all I meant to say.”
There's still plenty to come after what Harris called her ‘closing argument’
The event was framed as a campaign finale meant to lay out in stark terms the choice for voters next week. But it's far from Harris' last campaign event. She'll be hitting all the key battleground states as she makes her last pitch to voters.
She will headline events in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania on Wednesday, and on Thursday she will have rallies in Arizona and Nevada. More events are expected before Election Day.
The campaign is looking to pick up voters across many different demographics in the hope that a swing vote here and there may add up to a win in a razor's-edge race with Trump.
Kamala Harris Likens Trump to Mad ‘Petty Tyrant’ King George
Mini Racker
Tue 29 October 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers a speech on the National Mall.
WASHINGTON—Kamala Harris made her presidential bid’s “closing argument” Tuesday night, warning an electrified crowd of tens of thousands that Donald Trump is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.”
She alluded to Trump’s recent threats to use the U.S. military against Americans who disagree with him, implicitly comparing her GOP opponent to King George III, the British monarch who suffered from mental illness and spoke loquaciously until foam ran out of his mouth.
“Nearly 250 years ago America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant,” she said at the Ellipse, a location loaded with symbolism.
The Harris campaign estimated that 75,000 supporters flocked to the National Mall for Kamala Harris' final major campaign speech.
The Ellipse is where Trump, on Jan. 6, 2021, riled up his followers to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president. The expansive lawn on the National Mall sits just behind the White House, where Harris hopes to live come January.
“Americans died as a result of that attack,” Harris said, noting that as the violence unfolded on television that day, Trump’s response to his staff describing how protesters wanted to kill Mike Pence was reportedly, “So what?”
With the White House behind her, Harris said one of Trump’s “highest priorities is to set free the violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers on January 6th.”
Douglas Emhoff, and potential future first gentleman, was front and center for his wife's speech.
The Metropolitan Police Department originally expected 20,000 attendees at the Ellipse, but that number ballooned to more than 52,000. More than 75,000 attended, a Harris campaign official told the Daily Beast, the largest crowd Harris has drawn this year.
“This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power, trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other,” Harris warned Tuesday night. “That is who he is.”
Her aspirational speech was also laden with policy as she recapped her campaign promises to give tax cuts to middle-class families and entrepreneurs, protect and expand affordable health care, make housing affordable and—an issue paramount to her campaign—make abortion legal nationally and fight “Trump abortion bans” at the state level.
Kamala Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, the second gentleman, embrace on stage.
The speech marked the beginning of the end of a whirlwind three-month campaign. Harris’ entrance into the race after Biden stepped aside sparked wild enthusiasm among Democrats, and though she insisted she’s the “underdog,” her party was riding high for months.
But in the final weeks of the campaign, the Democratic candidate’s apparent lead over Trump has slipped, leaving them deadlocked in the polls just days away from Election Day.
A sense of deflation mingled with signs of hope in the shadows of the Washington Monument Tuesday night. Audience members who spoke to the Daily Beast said that they were hopeful Harris would defeat Trump, but few were confident, even though they streamed like a pilgrimage to the Ellipse to witness history.
Supporters wait for Kamala Harris to take the stage for her final major speech before Election Day.
Inside the security barriers, attendees waved American flags. Outside the fences, throngs of people looked on, with the crowd stretching past the Washington Monument and out of sight.
Harris urged everyone who came to vote on Tuesday.
“I’ve lived the Promise of America,” she said. “I see the Promise of America in all of you.”
