With so few days left till the election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump are pulling out all the stops in their pitches to voters. With the race the tightest in decades, both candidates and their teams know there are no votes that can be left on the table. Both candidates have also targeted the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania for more campaign stops than any other state. No candidate wins without Pennsylvania, which won the vote for Joe Biden in 2020 and lost it for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Outreach to “Country Over Party” GOP
Harris was in the Mainline suburb of Malvern Monday at a town hall moderated by Maria Shriver, a member of the Shriver and Kennedy families, former First Lady of California and well-known journalist. Sharing the stage for the gathering of mostly Republican women was former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Republican vice-chair of the January 6 Committee. The event was labeled “Country over Party.”
Harris had held a similar event in historic Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania a week earlier, the remarks of which were posted on the White House website. More than 100 former Republican officeholders and officials joined Harris in Washington Crossing, not far from where Gen. George Washington led hundreds of troops across the Delaware River to a major victory in the Revolutionary War. At a rally there, Cheney told Republican voters that the patriotic choice was to vote for Democrats.
Harris has been doing outreach to Republicans who are disenchanted with Trump and has amassed support from a group of prominent GOP politicians, former Trump staffers and military who are convinced — as four-star general Larry Ellis said as he endorsed Harris — that Trump is “dangerously unfit for Commander-in-Chief.” More than 200 Republican staffers who previously worked for either former President George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney or the late Sen. John McCain also endorsed Harris.
Harris herself, and Cheney and others working as surrogates along the campaign trail for the vice president, like former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, have echoed this same messaging. Harris has also consistently referred to Trump as “unhinged.” In Malvern, Harris said Trump “has been using the power of the presidency to demean and to divide us” and “people are exhausted with that” while Cheney said she was concerned about allowing a “totally erratic, completely unstable” Trump to run foreign policy.
Trump’s love affair with strongmen
Cheney said, “Our adversaries know that they can play Donald Trump. And we cannot afford to take that risk.”
This theme of Trump being played by America’s adversaries is one that Hillary Clinton focused on in 2016 when she said on the debate stage that Trump would be “Putin’s puppet.”
Trump has a soft-spot for dictators and has lauded Vladimir Putin and keeps praising authoritarian strongmen, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Trump has also said he wants to be a dictator on “day one” of his next term, were he elected.
And a scathing report in The Atlantic on Oct. 22 titled “I Need the Kind of Generals Hitler Had” — referencing a quote from Trump — states “The Republican nominee’s preoccupation with dictators, and his disdain for the American military, is deepening.”
Journalist Bob Woodward revealed that when tens of thousands of Americans were dying from COVID each week during the pandemic, Trump sent desperately needed testing and equipment to Putin to protect him. The Kremlin confirmed Trump sent the tests, after Trump denied Woodward’s claim.
Bullying, profanity and misogyny
Trump has always been a bully. During his tenure as president, he regularly used his Twitter account to attack individuals, perceived enemies and other politicians. Trump has also made more than 100 threats to prosecute or punish perceived enemies as an NPR investigation revealed Oct. 22.
NPR’s investigation found that Trump has repeatedly threatened to investigate, prosecute, jail or otherwise punish his political opponents, rivals and even private citizens. NPR noted that “Trump has also used recent appearances on podcast and cable interviews to escalate attacks on fellow Americans whom he calls ‘the enemy from within.’”
In an interview on Fox News, Trump said that if “radical left lunatics” disrupt the election, “it should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
On the campaign trail, he has attacked Harris and said she should be impeached for crimes he perceives she has committed as vice president. He reiterated this on Tuesday while campaigning in Miami. Trump also has called Harris “incompetent” and “mentally challenged.”
On Sept. 30 while campaigning in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump said, “Crooked Joe Biden became mentally impaired.” He added, “Sad. But lying Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way. There’s something wrong with Kamala. And I just don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something missing. And you know what, everybody knows it.”
On Oct. 22, at a campaign event in Miami with conservative Latinos, Trump invoked racist anti-Black tropes to describe the vice president, saying, “Who the hell takes off when you have 14 days left? She’s lazy. She’s lazy as hell.”
Trump also called Harris “slow,” with a “low IQ” — another racist trope stating that Black people aren’t as intelligent as white people. According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the stereotypes had a purpose and “were used to help commodify black bodies and justify the business of slavery.”
While campaigning Sunday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Trump resorted to profanity, calling Harris a “sh*t” vice president — a comment which Harris later said “demeaned the office” of president.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, Harris has actually been campaigning harder than Trump. While she was in meetings in Washington, D.C. Tuesday as the campaign barrels toward Election Day, she had scheduled interviews with Telemundo and NBC to air Tuesday evening.
And far from Harris being “lazy,” Tuesday was the first day in more than two weeks that she had no public events scheduled after more than 14 days straight of traveling to political events in swing states, including a blitz through Georgia on Sunday that began in a Black church and a three-state run on Monday, starting in Pennsylvania, then moving on to Michigan and Wisconsin — those three states Hillary lost in 2016.
What Trump didn’t discuss in Miami was events he held in Pennsylvania on Saturday and Sunday. He held a staged event at a closed McDonald’s outside Philadelphia in Trevose, where he “worked” the fry station for a few minutes and then held a press conference outside the delivery window and served a few select customers. The restaurant was closed to the public during the event. Trump claimed in a video on C-SPAN that there were 10,000 people in attendance.
As The Inquirer noted, there were no actual customers.Trump has been fixated on whether Harris actually worked at McDonald’s as a student, an experience she has referenced when discussing raising the minimum wage. Trump did not respond to questions about whether the minimum wage should be raised from $7.25 an hour where it has stood since 2009.
Sen. Bernie Sanders commented on the photo op on Twitter/X on Oct. 21, “Yesterday Donald Trump did 15 minutes of work at McDonald’s, where tens of thousands of employees earn starvation wages.
But when asked whether we need to raise the $7.25 minimum wage, he refused to comment.
I will comment. We need to raise the federal minimum wage to $17/hr.”
Trump’s fixation on genitalia, Team Trump’s homophobia
For years, Trump has presented himself as virile and a “man’s man.” His NFT trading cards all represent Trump in traditionally masculine roles from cowboy to fireman to superhero and all with a buff body nothing like Trump’s actual physique, which even when he was younger was not the ripped body on the cards.
At his campaign event in Latrobe on Sunday, Trump commented in vulgar detail about the size of legendary golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis. Palmer was a native of Latrobe. Vulgar as it was, the remarks were part of Trump’s consistent efforts at presenting himself as the zenith of masculinity and his opponents as weak and ineffectual.
Another element of this ploy to reel in votes with toxic masculinity has been used by both Trump and his surrogates, like Elon Musk and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which is to present Harris’s running mate Gov. Tim Walz as a closeted gay man and his behavior on the campaign trail, like his effusive use of his arms (something Trump also does), as “gay.”
Trump has also ratcheted up his false claims that schools are turning boys into girls at public schools with gender reassignment surgeries. (No mention of female to male surgeries as this is just about protecting boys’ genitalia.)
These ploys are all an effort to secure more male votes — particularly among more conservative Black and Latino voters and also tap into the suburban women who have led book banning in schools and feel anxious about their own children being “indoctrinated.” To that end, Trump has dedicated a full third of his ad buys to ads targeting Harris as pro-trans: “Kamala is for ‘they/them,’ not you.”These last days of the campaign will determine who gets the voters who have yet — for whatever reason — to choose a candidate. Trump is ahead with men by 16 points and Harris has been fighting to win over Black male voters who are leaning toward Trump and his claims of helping them more than Harris. But what still stands out starkly as this plays out is that Trump’s toxic masculinity led him to be an adjudicated rapist, convicted as a felon and be perceived globally as a danger not just to the U.S., but to the world.