Kamala Harris delivers her closing argument speech at the Ellipse in DC Tuesday, October 29: NAJ screen shot

News Analysis –
By Glynn Wilson –

Democrats have tried to frame Donald Trump as an aberration of the country’s democratic norms and political traditions for years. It worked for Joe Biden in 2020, when he argued that as president, Trump “eroded the soul of the nation.”

It did not work for Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she said he was mounting an “an unprecedented attack” on American democracy, but Trump’s political inclinations were not fully exposed then.

Now as Vice President Kamala Harris took to the stage at the site of Trump’s most infamous speech that riled up his supporters to riot at the Capitol, the Ellipse on the National Mall by the White House, and tried to unify the nation against him, she cast Trump as a “petty tyrant.”

He’s a twice impeached former president seeking a return to “unchecked power,” she said, and convicted felon determined to prosecute his political enemies and keep Americans “divided and afraid of each other.”

But she dropped Biden’s sharp attack on the MAGA Republican crowd that still clings to Trump’s coattails like the followers of a cult, trying to convince at least some college educated Republicans and white guys to vote for her instead.

“Here’s what I promise you: I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me,” she said. “On Day 1, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”

The thunderous applause Trump and other acts received at a race-baiting Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday night was a warning that Trump still has the support of not quite half the country, but a following nevertheless that could still retake the White House in key districts in swing battleground states. He and his followers have taken over the Republican Party, to the chagrin of many mainstream Republicans in and outside Washington.

She has traveled the battleground states for events with Republicans, including former Representative Liz Cheney, a conservative from Wyoming who is one of Trump’s most vocal critics. She has promised to appoint a Republican to her cabinet. Her campaign has made a series of direct appeals to those who previously voted for Trump, reminding them of the privacy inside the voting booth.

Just before she took the stage Tuesday night, President Biden seemed to refer to those who support Trump as “garbage” in a campaign call that quickly ricocheted across the web and social media, and was seized upon by Republicans. Biden said he meant only the comedian at Trump’s Sunday rally who had called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.”

Immediately drawing the ire of voters from Puerto Rico, who vowed to vote against Trump because of it, including hundreds of thousands in key battleground states like Pennsylvania.

It is Trump, Harris said, who “tends to demean and belittle and diminish the American people.”

She argues that Trump will sell out the economic needs of the middle class for his billionaire friends. Her policy proposals have focused on economic issues like increasing coverage of elder care, lowering child care costs, creating subsidies for new home buyers and fighting high grocery prices. Even abortion has been reframed through the lens of personal freedom and medical realities, rather than loftier questions of faith or morality.

“I pledge to seek common ground and common-sense solutions to make your lives better,” Harris told the crowd and viewers on television. “I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”

It was a last minute attempt to try to broaden the political tent. To win the election, Harris must energize a Democratic base that reviles Trump, while winning the support of independent and Republican voters who are more concerned about their pocketbooks, the economy and taxes than democracy itself.

Meanwhile, Trump has forgone the traditional strategy of unifying the party after a divisive primary contest, making few attempts to reach out to Republicans who backed former Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina. While she maintains her support for him, Trump prefers to talk about how “badly” he defeated Haley in her home state.

In recent weeks, he has escalated his attacks on the “enemy within,” insisting when pressed by conservative interviewers that he is referring directly to Democratic politicians and liberal activists who oppose him.

Trump sought to capitalize on Biden’s garbage remark onstage in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night, hoping voters might look past his own demonization of Democrats or those who disagree with him as “communists” and “vermin.”

Trump expressed no similar condemnation of comments made at his event earlier, when Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host, described the entire Democratic Party as “a bunch of degenerates, lowlifes and Jew haters.”

It was exactly that kind of inflammatory language that Harris promised to move beyond on Tuesday night. The country is divided, she acknowledged, but central to her campaign is a vow is that it doesn’t need to be so blatant all the time.

“The fact that someone disagrees with us, does not make them ‘the enemy from within,’” she said. “America, for too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust. And it can be easy to forget a simple truth: It doesn’t have to be this way.”

But even if Harris is successful in bringing together a coalition to defeat Trump, she may still be forced to contend with just how tight his hold remains over his party. His lies about the 2020 election pervade the Republican base, amplified for four years by conservative media, politicians and celebrities. If he wins, his supporters will not only see a new future but a rightful restoration. And if he loses, they are already primed to foment violence.

As Election Day approaches, Trump has added one more claim to his roster of attacks on Democrats. The party, he’s falsely predicted, is “going to cheat.”

We’ve been here before. It’s doubtful it will work again.

“It’s the only way they’re going to win,” he said this month in Juneau, Wisconsin. “And we can’t let it happen again.”

As he continues to try to stoke fear in the electorate, Harris gives voters a more sane and coherent choice of American leadership, grounded in democratic traditions of respect for the rule of law, equal rights and respect for fellow human beings.

We will find out out next week whether enough Americans are willing to show up to vote and save this democratic Republic, or whether those who would rather turn things over to a dictator who would supplant democracy with a theocratic oligopoly.

God help us all. Please get out and vote.

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