Former President Donald Trump tested new attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris before a conservative audience Friday night, linking her to the Biden administration’s policies on immigration and crime, with additional attacks on the state of California — and pronunciation of your name.
Trump’s speech in friendly territory at the conservative Turning Point Action Believers Summit was, in many ways, a series of his frequent attacks – that the 2020 election was “rigged”, the end of Roe v. it was something “everyone” wanted, and the US became a “dumping ground” for criminals from other countries.
The former president’s hour-long speech was his second public address since President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris, and showcased Trump’s efforts to regroup in real time against his new Democratic opponent.
In recent days, a wave of new research showed a much closer race between Trump and Harris than Trump and Biden, and Republicans fought to establish lines of attack against her. At a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, many of the former president’s supporters acknowledged that he Now he had a tougher race on his hands. And his campaign signaled Thursday that he might pull out of a previously planned Sept. 10 presidential debate that would now feature Harris instead of Biden.
In his speech in West Palm Beach on Friday, Trump took credit for Biden’s departure from the ticket, which came weeks after the president’s disastrous debate performance. But Trump turned his focus more to Harris, starting by calling her a “slut three weeks ago.”
While addressing a series of familiar campaign issues at the summit, billed as an event to “unite Christians across America,” Trump launched attacks on Harris against each of them. On immigration, he called her the “border czar” — a term that Republicans sought to attribute to her diplomatic mission working with Central American countries to address the causes of migration, and from which Democrats sought to distance her. He later suggested that the next Turning Point conference might well be held in Caracas, Venezuela, because crime had declined there while that country’s criminals had left for the US.
He also sought to link Harris to a recently passed California law that prohibits school districts from exposing trans children, saying that he supported the “trampling of parental rights”. And he uttered multiple pronunciations of her first name, Kamala, throughout the night, saying he “couldn’t care less” if she pronounced it incorrectly.
He argued that the vice president would nominate a “radical Marxist” to the Supreme Court — contrasting this with the three “courageous” justices he nominated, citing their ruling that overturned Roe v.. He also defended that landmark 2022 ruling as “what the pro-life movement fought to achieve for 50 years” and something “all legal scholars” wanted, accusing Harris of supporting extreme abortion policies.
Trump also argued that protesters who sprayed pro-Hamas graffiti in Washington on Wednesday were “supporters of Kamala Harris,” even though Harris condemned them. And he accused Harris, whose husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish, of “not liking Jewish people,” and questioned how Jews or Catholics in the US can vote for Democrats.
“With four more years of Harris, who was worse than Joe Biden in the truest sense, and much more liberal, America will be decimated by migrant crime, demolished by fascism, devastated by runaway inflation, and impoverished by the complete obliteration of American energy, ” he said.
In a statement, Harris campaign spokesman James Singer said Trump “generally seemed like someone you wouldn’t want to sit with in a restaurant — let alone be president of the United States.”
“America can do better than the bitter, bizarre and retrograde delusions of criminal Donald Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris offers a vision for America’s future focused on freedom, opportunity and security,” said Singer.
Concluding his remarks, Trump told the audience that it was important for Christians to get out and vote in November.
Four years from now, he argued, the country will be “so fixed that it won’t be necessary to vote.”
This story originally appeared on Politico.com read the full story
