Harris preparing for upcoming Trump debate in battleground Pennsylvania
(PITTSBURGH) — Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Thursday to hunker down and prepare for the ABC News Sept. 10 debate with former President Donald Trump, according to a campaign aide.
Choosing to stay in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state, could potentially allow Harris to continue campaigning while she prepares for the debate — and what will be her first in-person meeting with Trump.
The debate is a critical moment for Harris as it could be her last opportunity to pitch herself to a large television audience.
Harris has been preparing for the debate for weeks now. She has been holding mock debates at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., with former Hillary Clinton aide Phillips Reines playing the part of Trump while wearing a wig, according to a source.
Reines isn’t the only one assisting Harris in her preparation — she’s also enlisted former White House aides Karen Dunn, Sean Clegg and Rohini Kosoglu. All three worked with her during her 2020 vice presidential debate against Mike Pence.
Asked by reporters Wednesday how her debate preparations were going, Harris responded, “So far, so good.”
While in Pittsburgh, Harris will work on maintaining a calm demeanor as she makes a case for her own presidency while holding Trump accountable for his, according to a source familiar with Harris’ debate preparations.
If Trump dodges a question or begins launching attacks, she wants to be able to successfully pivot the conversation, the source added.
That same source said the vice president will also focus on avoiding going down policy rabbit holes, which the source said was something she did during her 2019 debates.
Harris’ latest high-profile debates were during her presidential run four years ago and her vice presidential debate with Pence. This cycle, Trump debated President Joe Biden in June.
The ABC News debate will take place on Tuesday, Sept. 10 at 9 p.m ET. A prime-time pre-debate special will air at 8 p.m. ET.
(TUCSON, Ariz.) — Former President Donald Trump unveiled a new economic policy on Thursday before a crowd in Tucson, Arizona, saying he would end taxing overtime pay.
“Today, I’m also announcing that as part of our additional tax cuts, we will end all taxes on overtime,” Trump said to loud cheers, “That gives people more of an incentive to work; it gives the companies a lot. It’s a lot easier to get the people.”
“The people who work overtime are among the hardest working citizens in our country, and for too long, no one in Washington has been looking out for them. … It’s time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Trump has previously proposed ending taxes on tips and on Social Security benefits.
Trump offered no specifics on his new proposal, spending much of the speech airing his grievances about this week’s ABC News-hosted debate and again declaring he would not participate in any more, as he had earlier in the day, and attacking his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris.
“So, because we’ve done two debates and because they were successful, there will be no third debate,” said Trump to cheers in Tucson. “It’s too late anyway, the voting has already begun. You got to go out and vote. We got to vote.”
He continued to also launch personal attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, mimicking her speaking style and expressions and mocking her name by saying nobody knows what her last name is.
“Now, Kamala is a very different kind of a word, nice name, very nice name,” Trump said. “You don’t know her as Harris. When you say Harris, everyone says, ‘Who the hell is that?’ right?”
Before unveiling his new economic proposal, the former president attempted to link immigration to the high cost of housing, arguing that a surge in undocumented migrants were driving up costs and creating dangerous neighborhoods.
Despite the fact that there were bomb threats reported in the town earlier Thursday and city officials vehemently and repeatedly denying the assertions, Trump again claimed that Haitian migrants were abducting animals in Springfield, Ohio – though not going as far on Thursday as to claim that they were eating them as he did in the debate and on his Truth Social platform.
In an anti-immigrant rant, Trump declared that the United States was being conquered by “foreign elements.” He ticked through stories of different cities and towns that he argued were being hurt by an influx of people crossing the border. In some instances, the former president didn’t name specific places, instead opting for general fear mongering rhetoric.
“There are hundreds and hundreds or thousands of stories. They’re coming in from all over the world, from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums and many tourists at numbers that we have never seen before. You’ve never seen these numbers before,” he said.
Despite Trump’s claims, a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed U.S.-born citizens “are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes” than undocumented immigrants.
And overall, both murder and rape rates are down 26% compared to the same time frame last year, according to the latest FBI statistics, which are released quarterly.
As with many of Trump’s economic policy rollouts, he offered little specifics over how the proposal would work and be paid for — which would likely fall on taxpayers. However, he did claim that President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan was “unfair” to people who paid off their loans.
“You know, he kept saying to these students, no more loans, no more loans, which was very unfair to the millions of people that actually paid off their loans over the years. Some of them took 20 years to pay them off, but, but that’s a dead deal.”
When it came to his affordable housing proposal, in an attempt to court suburban women, Trump highlighted his promise to protect single-family zoning, which some have argued could lead to discriminatory practices.
He also promised to protect single-family zoning, which some have argued is a form of exclusionary zoning to push minorities out of suburban communities.
“The Radical Left wants to abolish the suburbs by forcing apartment complexes and low-income housing into the suburbs right next to your beautiful house,” said Trump, who then turned to make his appeal to suburban women.
“The suburbs were safe. That’s why, when they say suburban women maybe don’t like Trump. I think they’re wrong. I think they love me. I do. I never had problems with women. I never had any problems,” he said.
(CHICAGO) — When then-Sen. Barack Obama took the stage on Aug. 28, 2008, to accept the Democratic nomination for president, he did not mention the historic nature of his run. While he gave a nod to his midwestern middle-class upbringing and his Kenyan roots, the man who became the first Black president of the United States urged voters to unite and declared that the campaign was not about him.
“I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It’s been about you,” Obama said.
Fifteen years later, when Obama took the DNC stage on Tuesday night, he delivered a resounding endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Obama struck a similar tone. He did not explicitly discuss Harris’ racial identity as a Black and South Asian woman or her gender identity like Hillary Clinton did on Monday night when the former Democratic nominee passed the torch to Harris with a reference to breaking the “glass ceiling.”
“Kamala Harris won’t be focused on her problems – she’ll be focused on yours,” Obama said.
Harris, who embarked on a historic run of her own, would become the first female president and second president of color if elected in the 2024 general election.
She has spoken with pride about her Jamaican and Indian heritage, and when she ran for president in 2020, her campaign logo was modeled after that of Shirley Chisholm – the first Black woman to run for president – and when she addressed the DNC as vice presidential nominee, she paid tribute to the women of color in politics who came before her.
It is unclear if Harris will focus on her historic run when she delivers her own acceptance speech at the DNC on Thursday. But according to experts who study race, politics and the White House, Harris has so far not made her identity a central part of her 2024 campaign like Clinton did in 2016 and like Harris did in 2020 and has instead, taken a page out of the playbook that propelled the first Black president to the White House.
“[Like Obama], Harris is letting other people talk about her identity. So you’re putting out the surrogates,” Nadia Brown, a professor of government at Georgetown University who studies Black women in politics, told ABC News. “She’s not shying away from her identity, but she’s not centering this entire race and campaign on her identity.”
But is this a winning strategy?
‘Not more of the same’
Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris last month, there has been a surge in “enthusiasm” for the Democratic ticket that crossed “generational boundaries,” according to Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, who studies race and the American presidency. This shift in energy was evidenced by the $310 million fundraising haul that her campaign raised in July alone, Rigueur said.
This surge in enthusiasm is reflected in an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released on Sunday, which found that 50% overall say they’d be enthusiastic or satisfied if Harris were elected, compared with 36% who said that about Biden in early 2023.
According to Rigueur, the shift in “energy” is not merely a reflection of voters being excited about the historic nature of Harris’ run, but also indicative of the dissatisfaction with another matchup between Biden and former President Donald Trump – “a race between two really old white guys.”
“I think there is a real kind of excitement about the possibility of what Kamala Harris’ presidency represents,” Rigueur told ABC News. “And I think it’s also fair to say that it’s not simply that she is a woman or that she is Black or that she is Indian that is driving this enthusiasm, but instead the sensibility that … she’s refreshing; that she is new; that she is young, and that she’s not more of the same.”
But on the other hand, Brown said that like Obama, Harris has to strike a “balance” because in working to build the “rainbow coalition” she needs – one that includes independents and Trump-leaning voters – Harris is also navigating racism and the reality that some Americans are “not comfortable” with having a woman of color as president.
While “not more of the same” appeals to some voters, Brown said that for others, “it could be alienating.” This, according to Brown, is part of what informs why Harris has been focused on policy in her wider pitch to battleground state voters and has not centered the conversation around her own identity.
In her stump speeches and campaign ads so far, Harris has touted her middle-class roots – much like Obama did in 2008 – in an effort to connect with voters and make the case that she knows what it’s like to work hard, Brown said.
“She grew up in a middle-class home. She was the daughter of a working mom and she worked at McDonald’s while she got her degree,” a Harris ad that touts her goals to lower health care costs and make housing more affordable says. “Being president is about who you fight for and she’s fighting for people like you.”
According to Rigueur, Harris’ strategy to focus on policy and the people, instead of the candidate, is guided by an understanding that there “is a burgeoning of a movement that sees Kamala Harris as its vehicle, not its endgame.”
“There is something novel about Kamala Harris, and it’s something that she has chosen not to emphasize in her campaign,” Rigueur said. “And I actually think that’s a smart decision [that] she’s chosen not to emphasize it, and she doesn’t need to emphasize it because it’s so apparent – it is the elephant in the room.”
‘The Obama effect’
According to Rigueur, Harris is also navigating a political landscape where “the Obama effect” is at play, where there is “an emotional difference” between new generations who grew up with a Black president, “as opposed to, say, my grandmother, who never thought that she would live to see a Black man become President of the United States.”
“I think this comes out too, in attitudes towards what people think about [when it comes to] change and progress,” Rigueur said.
Brown echoed this notion.
“People put their hopes and dreams, I think, unrealistically, on Obama, because there just wasn’t a large civic understanding about how politics works,” she said. “Just the symbolism of having the first Black president was enough for many people that they didn’t question or look into his policy preferences. And I think the difference today is, yeah, people, know.”
And this is what Brown, who is conducting research at the 2024 DNC this week, found through interviews with protesters about how they feel about a Harris presidency and whether her racial or gender identity is something that inspires them.
Brown said she was “surprised” by how many young people of color expressed that they “don’t care” about Harris’ identity and are instead concerned with her politics, particularly her stance on the Israel-Hamas war.
“There’s a large number of people I’ve been surveying – talking to, here – who really disdain these boxes, right? They don’t want to, you know, identify as voting for a woman because they are a woman, and they want to talk about policy,” Brown said.
According to the latest ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released Sunday, 38% of Americans say that having a woman serve as president would be a good thing for the country, far more than the 14% who see it as a bad thing. The rest, 47%, say it makes no difference.
The poll also found that support from Black people has swung by 12 points in Harris’ direction, from +60 for Biden in July to +72 for Harris now. But Brown said having a Black candidate is not enough – particularly in a post-Obama world.
“Black voters want more,” she said, adding that Harris’ strategy has shifted and she is “going down a different path” in 2024 than she did during her 2020 presidential campaign by making more efforts to speak authentically to Black voters.
“Being in communities with Black people like going to HBCUs, showing up at these Black civil rights organizing spaces, talking about black maternal health,” she added. “Some of these things are showing it’s not that I’m Black, but I actually am part of these communities.”
(HOWELL, Mich.) — Former President Donald Trump continued his Democratic National Convention counterprogramming week in Howell, Michigan, on Tuesday, for a speech that was supposed to be dedicated to crime and safety, but one in which he repeatedly criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’ record as a prosecutor while once again reaffirming his support for police.
“We’re here today to talk about how we are going to stop the Kamala crime wave that is going on at levels that nobody has ever seen before. And she is, as you know, the most radical left person ever even thought of for high office, certainly for the office of president. People don’t know the real Kamala, but I do,” said Trump as law enforcement officials stood behind him.
However, once again, an unfocused Trump failed to advocate for certain, specific policy reforms he was supposed to call for during his remarks.
According to speech experts obtained by ABC News before Trump delivered his remarks, the former president was supposed to call for the death penalty for child rapists and child traffickers, advocate for stop-and-frisk policies, as well as making “it a felony for any medical professional to perform surgery on a minor without parental consent.”
Throughout his remarks, without providing evidence, Trump painted a dangerous picture of what America would look like should the Harris-Walz ticket be elected whereas he would create a “crime-free America,” he argued.
“Mothers will no longer be losing their children because of weak, liberal policies and politicians that have given up on securing a crime free America. We want a crime-free America. We’re going to stop violent crime in the United States. And it’s people like this that can do the job better than anybody. They do the job justly and fairly,” said Trump praising the law enforcement officials nearby.
As Trump ticked through crime statistics, the FBI says that, for the first quarter of 2024, compared to the same period of 2023, violent crime decreased by 15.2 %. Murder decreased by 26.4%, rape decreased by 25.7%, robbery decreased by 17.8%, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5%.
The former president accused Harris of not trying to fight crime in the United States, latching on to previous comments she made about police funding to argue that, as president, she would work to “defund the police.”
“She wants to destroy policemen in general, and they ruin your lives, your jobs, and they ruin everything you’ve lived for, everything you’ve felt that you want to make great,” Trump said talking to the sheriffs. “You want to make our country great. When I’m president of the United States again, we will never even think about or mention the words defund the police.”
In a series of interviews conducted in the midst of widespread demonstrations around the nation following the murder of George Floyd where there was an uptick in demands for police reform, Harris occasionally expressed support for some of the principles underlying the “defund the police” movement and advocated for a “reimagining” of policing nationwide.
Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer previously told ABC News Harris has “supported increased funding to keep our communities safe and hold convicted felons like Trump accountable — which is why America is currently seeing a near 50-year low in violent crime.”
Trump also highlighted Harris’s support of abolishing cash bail, arguing it led to an uptick in crime before drawing a connection between the protestors arrested during the murder of George Floud and then Jan 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a Trump-led mob.
“When the violent mobs of looters and anarchists tried to burn down Minneapolis in 2020, Kamala Harris raised money for bail to bail out the arsonists and the rioters and the killers. People were killed. Many people were killed,” said Trump.
“Compare that to J6, nobody was killed. Nobody was killed. They weren’t fires set. They burned down the city. They were burning down Minneapolis. And she went out. And not only did she work a little bit with them, she worked a lot with them. She worked to get them out and to make them– to set them free,” Trump falsely claimed, as people were killed on Jan 6.
As protests broke out in Minnesota at the time, Harris asked her backers to “chip in” to a bail fund to support anyone arrested after bond on the social networking platform Twitter, which is now known as X, a post that Republican have repeatedly cited in their attacks.
On Tuesday, Trump promised to “make a record investment in hiring, retention, and training of police officers,” going on to accuse Democrats of not looking out for the livelihood of officers.
At one point while praising Michigan law enforcement, Trump said he would love to have them working during the election in “different territories of your state” to keep things “under control” like the officers do in their home area.
“I don’t want to say any particular names of locations, but I can think of a big one in this state. I’d love to have them working there during the election, I can tell you.”
The former president said he wouldn’t specifically name areas but throughout the campaign cycle he has continually criticized voting procedures in heavily-Democratic areas such as Detroit.
Trump’s visit to Howell has drawn criticism from the Harris campaign capitalizing on reports of demonstrations last month in the city during which masked individuals marched through downtown chanting “We love Hitler. We love Trump,” according to local newspaper Livingston Daily.
The march took place the same day Trump was campaigning in Grand Rapids, just 100 miles west of Howell, with two demonstrations taking place with at least a dozen individuals gathered waving flags with a swastika, the term “KKK” and other antisemitic messaging, and chanting “Heil Hitler,” Livingston Daily reported.
But Trump isn’t the only presidential candidate to campaign in Howell. Notably, President Joe Biden also visited the town to talk about infrastructure in 2021.
On Wednesday, as Trump was wrapping up his speech, a reporter asked him what his response was to criticism he has garnered for hosting a campaign rally in Howell, to which Trump quipped: Who was here in 2021?”
“Joe Biden,” the reporter responded, earning a laugh from Trump who then walked away.
The Harris campaign criticized Trump for not outright condemning the demonstrators.
“Today, Donald Trump refused to condemn white supremacists who marched in his name,” said Harris-Walz Spokesperson Sarafina Chitika in a statement to ABC News. “Donald Trump can’t bring us together so he tries to drive us apart. The American people will reject his failed leadership and divisive agenda this November.”
Livingston County, where Howell is located, is one of very few counties surrounding the liberal Detroit metropolitan area that has constantly remained Republican in recent elections.
As some of the nearby counties in southeast Michigan gradually turned red over the years, Livingston became more and more solidly Republican, with Trump winning the county with more than 60% of votes both in 2016 and 2020.
Howell, which reports a white population of roughly 96%, well over Michigan’s white population of 73%, has had a “complicated history” with race, the Livingston Daily reported last month.
The local paper detailed the town’s history of various racial tensions stemming from the 1800s up to this year, including infamous local Ku Klux Klan member Robert Miles’ violent rallies and demonstrations in the 1960s and 70s to repeated racial allegations that have surfaced in town in recent years.