The iconic columns of the White House glowed behind her. In front of her, thousands of supporters held “USA” signs and wore bracelets that lit up red and blue across the grassy acres of the Ellipse. A week before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris decided to make her prime-time closing argument to Americans, not from one of the seven closely contested battleground states but from the same spot in Washington, D.C., where Donald Trump had rallied his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to overturn his 2020 election loss.
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The place was the point. Harris wanted voters to remember Trump’s recalcitrance that day—when he didn’t act to protect Vice President Mike Pence from rioters chanting for his hanging or listen to pleas from fellow Republicans to call off supporters who were attacking law enforcement at the Capitol—and what he’s done in the years since, when he’s continued to deny the election results and promised to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters convicted of assault.
In a forceful, 30-minute speech, Harris asked voters to elect her and “turn the page” on Trump.
“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,” she said.
Harris compared Trump to a “petty tyrant” who is “unstable,” “obsessed with revenge,” and wants “unchecked power.” She said he wants back in the Oval Office, “not to focus on your problems but to focus on his.” Trump has signaled support for military tribunals for political enemies, promised to purge the federal bureaucracy of workers who don’t agree with him, and said he’d use the military against opponents he calls “the enemy within.” Trump would come into the Oval Office with an “enemies list,” Harris said. She’ll show up with a “to do list.”
Early voting is underway in nearly every state, and polls show the race in a dead heat. Trump’s campaign spent the previous days trying to contain the fallout from racist jokes and sexist comments made by speakers at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday. Harris, meanwhile, has worked to stave off defections from the left over her support for arming Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza. During the speech, several protestors in different sections of the crowd began shouting “Stop the genocide!” and were escorted away by police. One person unfurled a pink banner that read “Kamala: No weapons to Israel” before being removed.
Harris has also been trying to convince Republicans alarmed by Trump’s autocratic comments to vote for her, campaigning with former Wyoming Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and running ads showing Republicans explaining why they’re voting for her.
Harris has laid out a raft of forward-looking ideas for the country in recent weeks, trying to describe a positive vision for what she could accomplish if voters agree to promote her. During her Tuesday night speech, Harris promised to protect women’s access to abortion and reproductive health care, and she said she would work to reduce costs for Americans. She outlined a plan to cut red tape for home builders to alleviate the housing shortage that is driving prices higher. She said she’d penalize companies that gouge consumers on groceries. She proposed expanding Medicare to include home care.
Trump’s campaign has pounced on those proposals, urging voters to wonder why she didn’t do more to enact her policy wishlist over the past four years as the No. 2 in the White House. Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said voters should blame Harris for inflation, conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and crime caused by recent immigrants. “Kamala’s first day in office was over 1,300 days ago, and she has spent the past four years working hand-in-hand with Joe Biden to destroy our country—but now, she is lying about her record because she has zero policy solutions to offer,” Leavitt said in a statement following Harris’s Tuesday night speech. “As for President Trump, his closing argument to the American people is simple: Kamala broke it; he will fix it.”
But many Harris supporters at the rally were less focused on what Harris would do if she got to the Oval Office than on blocking Trump from getting back there. Gretchen McMullen, 64, came into Washington from Accokeek, Md., to see Harris speak. She wants to be able to tell her newborn granddaughter about it when she’s older and “show her the side of history I stood on.” McMullen is retired from the Army and is now a case manager helping severely injured veterans, and she said Trump’s public comments that he would use the military go after the “enemy within” have alarmed her. “The thought that my fellow comrades would be turned on their own, it scared me,” she said.
Mitzi Maxwell, 69, decided to fly from outside Orlando, Fla., to attend Harris’s speech after her 88-year-old mother told her, “I think we have to go.” Maxwell has been writing postcards for the Harris campaign and waving signs in support of Harris around her hometown of Howey-in-the-Hills. But Maxwell wanted to come to Harris’ speech on the Ellipse to be a part of restoring the place itself. She wanted to be here in person, she said, to “help rid this beautiful place of the negativity and grief from the awful tragedy that Jan. 6 was.”
