Harris attacks Trump at energetic 1st presidential rally in Milwaukee
(WEST ALLIS) — Vice President Kamala Harris rallied voters in battleground Wisconsin on Tuesday, her first presidential campaign event since securing enough delegate pledges for the Democratic nomination if they keep their word — and used the rally to sharply frame her race against former President Donald Trump.
Since Sunday, Harris has earned the backing of Democratic Party leaders and enough Democratic National Convention delegates to make her the nominee if they kept true to their pledges — a major milestone for the vice president.
“So Wisconsin, I am told as of this morning that we have earned the support of enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. And I am so very honored, and I pledge to you, I will spend the coming weeks continuing to unite our party so that we are ready to win in November,” Harris said to an energetic crowd in West Allis, Wisconsin — just outside of Milwaukee.
Harris attacked Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, on the issue of abortion and Project 2025, the conservative presidential transition blueprint fronted by the Heritage Foundation.
“We’ll stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans because we trust women to make decisions about their own body and not have the government tell them what to do,” Harris said to raucous applause. “And when Congress passes the law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States, I will sign it into law.”
Harris, in recent weeks, has leaned into her career as a prosecutor, having served as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general, to draw a contrast with Trump, who was convicted of 34 felony counts.
During the rally, Harris touted her previous experience while making a dig at Trump.
“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said. “So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
The comments elicited the chant of “lock him up” from the crowd — a reference to the popular “lock her up” chants from crowds at Trump’s rallies when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Harris’ campaign chose Wisconsin — a key battleground state in the 2024 race — as the site of her first campaign event. Wisconsin hosted the Republican National Convention last week.
“Vice President Harris’s visit will highlight the choice facing Wisconsinites: between Donald Trump, the convicted felon who would drag this country backwards, and her brighter vision for the future, where our freedoms are protected and every American has a fair shot,” the campaign said in the memo.
Before taking the stage, Harris’ campaign announced that her political operation raised $100 million in just over a day since getting in the race for president after President Joe Biden announced he would bow out of the race.
The massive sum — raised by the Harris campaign, the Democratic National Committee and their joint fundraising committees — came in between Sunday afternoon and Monday evening, the campaign said. Within that time, 58,000 people signed up to volunteer, a figure that is more than 100 times their average daily sign-up rate, according to the campaign.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden said on Friday that he would be returning to the campaign trail next week to continue to take on rival Donald Trump, as he contends with the fallout from his COVID-19 diagnosis and growing calls from Democrats for him to bow out, including from Ohio Sen, Sherrod Brown on Friday evening, the fourth senator to do so.
“I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda while making the case for my own record and the vision that I have for America: one where we save our democracy, protect our rights and freedoms, and create opportunity for everyone,” Biden said in a statement.
“The stakes are high, and the choice is clear,” Biden added. “Together, we will win.”
The president also criticized Trump’s Thursday night keynote speech at the Republican National Convention, saying the former president “focused on his own grievances, with no plan to unite us and no plan to make life better for working people.”
“Last night the American people saw the same Donald Trump they rejected four years ago,” Biden wrote.
Biden has been sidelined since Wednesday when he was diagnosed with COVID-19 moments before delivering remarks in Las Vegas at the UnidosUS conference, the largest Latino civil rights group in the country. He abruptly cut his trip short and flew to his beach home in Rehoboth Beach, Del.
Boarding Air Force One Wednesday, Biden struggled to walk up the shorter stairs that pull out from under the plane. And after arriving in Dover, he again struggled deplaning, and Secret Service appeared to physically help him into the waiting SUV.
But Biden’s determination to return to the campaign trail appears to be because his team is reenergized by Trump’s speech.
“He’s playing the greatest hits from 2016 – Trump has not changed, he has not moderated, he has gotten worse,” a Biden adviser said Thursday night. “And he is making no appeal to moderates.”
The president said Trump laid out a “dark vision” for America’s future and that “Together, as a party and as a country, we can and will defeat him at the ballot box.”
But his party is not together. Democrats remain split on whether Biden can beat Trump in November and on Friday at least 10 Democrats joined the chorus calling on Biden to resign, including Texas Rep. Marc Veasey, the first member from the influential Congressional Black Caucus to do so.
“Mr. President, with great admiration for you personally, sincere respect for your decades of public service and patriotic leadership, and deep appreciation for everything we have accomplished together during your presidency, it is now time for you to pass the torch to a new generation of Democratic leaders,” Veasey co-wrote in a letter with Reps. Jared Huffman, Chuy Garcia, and Mark Pocan.
“We must defeat Donald Trump to save our democracy… At this point, however, we must face the reality that widespread public concerns about your age and fitness are jeopardizing what should be a winning campaign,” the four congressmen added.
Brown, in a close reelection fight, said in a statement that many Ohioans had contacted him.
“Over the last few weeks, I’ve heard from Ohioans on important issues, such as how to continue to grow jobs in our state, give law enforcement the resources to crack down on fentanyl, protect Social Security and Medicare from cuts, and prevent the ongoing efforts to impose a national abortion ban. These are the issues Ohioans care about and it is my job to keep fighting for them,” he said.
“I agree with the many Ohioans who have reached out to me. At this critical time, our full attention must return to these important issues. I think the President should end his campaign,” he said.
Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman, who represents a battleground Ohio district, both also pointed to Trump and the risk to “democracy” for reasons Biden should exit.
“There is too much on the line, and we have to be able to make that case to the American people about the change we need and the country we all deserve,” Landsman wrote in his statement. “After weeks of consideration and hundreds of conversations with constituents, I have come to the conclusion that Joe Biden is no longer the best person to make that case.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, a close ally of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a letter addressed to the president on Thursday, but was first reported on Friday, made a similar argument doubting Biden can effectively run a winning campaign.
“I want to be clear that should you formally become the Democratic nominee for President I will do everything I can to promote your candidacy and to work for your success,” Lofgren wrote in the letter obtained by ABC News. “Unfortunately, I greatly doubt that the outcome will be positive, and our country will pay a dreadful price for that.”
“I’m not here to say that this hasn’t been a tough several weeks for the campaign,” O’Malley Dillon said. “There’s no doubt that it has been, and we’ve definitely seen some slippage in support, but it has been a small movement, and you know this, the reason is because so much of this race is hardened already.”
In what was a bruising day for the president, with the calls from congressional Democrats urging him to drop out swelling to 34 by ABC News’s count, Biden did get critical support from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
The group’s political arm, BOLD PAC, on Friday endorsed the president, a week after his call with the group, saying he and Vice President Kamala Harris “have delivered for the Latino community.”
Amid news of more congressional Democrats on Friday joining calls for Biden to step aside, his campaign said it recognizes that the “urgency” of beating Donald Trump has led some Democrats to publicly abandon their support of the president leading the ticket — though they remain confident the party will unite by November.
“While the majority of the caucus and the diverse base of the party continues to stand with the President and his historic record of delivering for their communities, we’re clear-eyed that the urgency and stakes of beating Donald Trump means others feel differently,” Biden campaign spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement to ABC News.
“We all share the same goal: an America where everyone gets a fair shot and freedom and democracy are protected,” Ehrenberg added. “Unlike Republicans, we’re a party that accepts – and even celebrates – differing opinions, but in the end, we will absolutely come together to beat Donald Trump this November.”
(WASHINGTON) — Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D, said Sunday that Democrats are “moving forward” after President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign and passed the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris.
“This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl on Sunday pressed Klobuchar on comments Biden made, saying that Democrats were concerned that his presence atop the ticket this November would drag down House and Senate candidates. Klobuchar didn’t speculate on what caused Biden to step down from the 2024 presidential race but cast Harris’ candidacy as a turning of the page in the Democratic Party.
“He made the honorable decision, he took the honorable path. And for me, I am not looking in the rearview mirror about who said what, and who hurt whose feelings. For me, this is about, as Kamala Harris has said over and over again, this is about moving forward and not going backward,” Klobuchar said.
“People are interested in moving forward, and they respect President Biden. I love Joe Biden, but we are moving forward as a party and as a nation,” she said.
Klobuchar, like other Democratic lawmakers, expressed excitement about Harris’ candidacy and her selection of Tim Walz — Klobuchar’s state governor — as her running mate, swatting away attacks that the pair is too liberal to defeat former President Donald Trump.
“Kamala Harris is [a] voice of the future, but when you look at what she’s done in her life, she was a prosecutor running the biggest attorney general’s office in the United States of America. She put people behind bars. She went after murderers and rapists. So, they can try to paint her whatever way they want, but that was her North Star for many, many years,” Klobuchar said. “She is not going to let this get to her, and nor is Tim Walz, who was a fantastic choice for vice president.”
Still, Klobuchar had to play some defense for the new Democratic ticket.
Harris has not extensively talked to the media since becoming the presidential nominee, sparking criticism from Republicans — though she did say she hopes to schedule a sit-down interview with a media outlet by the end of the month.
“Twenty-one days, Jonathan, of running for president, before that she did tons of interviews. She’s done interviews with you. She’s done interviews. I’m sure she’s going to do interviews. Just last night in Nevada she talked to the press. I was reading about some of her answers. Look, she is going to talk to the press,” Klobuchar said.
Klobuchar also defended Walz, who found himself facing criticism last week over past comments suggesting he served in combat during his 24 years in the Army National Guard, even though he did not. (In a video clip tweeted out by the Harris campaign last week, Walz tells an audience that he carried guns “in war” while trying to make the case for restrictions on gun access.) Republicans also raised questions over his retirement and whether he knew his unit was going to be deployed to Iraq when he retired to run for Congress.
The Harris campaign said he misspoke about serving in a war zone, and Klobuchar and other Democrats have defended the timing of his retirement, with conflicting reports emerging over whether he was aware of the pending deployment when he made his decision in 2005.
“I think he made the decision that he was going to run for Congress, and that was his decision. He served four years longer than he would have had to serve to retire in the Guard. He stepped down simply because he made a decision to run,” Klobuchar said. “That’s why he stepped down, and it’s completely acceptable.”
(WASHINGTON) — Vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance went on the “Megyn Kelly Show” podcast Friday to defend his past remarks where he questioned Democratic leaders, including Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for not having biological children, referring to them as “childless cat ladies.”
Vance made the comments in 2021, but they have recently resurfaced after former first lady Hillary Clinton shared a clip of the comments on X earlier this week — a little more than a week after Trump picked Vance as his running mate. Harris — who was among those Vance attacked — has secured commitments from enough delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee if they all honor their commitment when voting, according to ABC News reporting.
“We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” Vance said in the 2021 Fox News interview.
The main argument Vance made during his Friday interview with Kelly is that the Democratic Party is “anti-family” and that his criticism was not directed at those who don’t have kids.
“The simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way,” Vance told Kelly.
“I explicitly said in my remarks, despite the fact that the media has lied about this, that this is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, didn’t have kids. This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child,” he added.
Vance’s original comments form 2021 mentioned the “choices” those Democrats had made that led them to be “miserable” and “childless cat ladies.”
While Vance claims Democrats are “anti-family and anti-child,” President Joe Biden and Harris have advocated for the child tax credit. The expanded child tax credit put in place during COVID expired in 2021 after pressure from Republicans and independent Joe Manchin. Democrats continue to fight to bring it back — with Biden calling for it to be put back in place in his FY2025 budget.
Vance said in the interview that he hopes parents realize he’s fighting for them.
“I’m proud to stand up for parents, and I hope the parents out there recognize that I’m a guy who wants to fight for you. I want to fight for your interests. I want to fight for your stake in the country. And that is what this is fundamentally about,” Vance said.
But Vance’s past comments have received massive backlash.
Kerstin Emhoff, mother to Cole and Ella Emhoff and the ex-wife of second gentleman Doug Emhoff, called Vance’s “cat lady” comments “baseless attacks.”
“For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it,” Kerstin Emhoff said.
Ella Emhoff, the daughter of second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Harris’ stepdaughter, posted on her story on Instagram, “I love my three parents” while highlighting her mom’s statement. She asked “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I.”
Buttigieg also reacted to Vance’s comments on CNN Tuesday night, telling anchor Kaitlin Collins that Vance shouldn’t comment on other people’s children.
“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg said. “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”
ABC News’ Kelsey Walsh and MaryAlice Parks contributed to this report