Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris plans to deliver a speech condemning President Donald Trump on Thursday for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The speech will come hours before Trump is set to accept renomination for a second term.
With Trump planning an evening address from the White House lawn, Ms. Harris’ afternoon remarks from Washington will be the Democrats’ main counter to the president on the final day of the Republicans’ convention.
“Part of what I will be talking about is that they’re dealing in lies, but also they are not grounded in reality,” Harris said during a Wednesday fundraiser, adding that many Americans are grieving the loss of loved ones and normalcy amid the pandemic.
“They want better than this, and we are better than this,” she said.
Biden has made similar arguments about Trump for months, and Harris picked up on that criticism in both her introductory speech as Biden’s pick and when she accepted the party’s nomination last week during the Democratic convention.
But the California senator’s words on Thursday are billed as her most focused denunciation of Trump since joining the ticket. Her tack will test an argument that the former prosecutor tried last summer, as a White House candidate, to show that she is ready to “prosecute the case” against Trump and his “rap sheet.”
In a Washington Post op-ed published Wednesday, she detailed the history of women’s struggle to gain voting rights, especially women of color who were not granted suffrage even with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Vice presidential nominees are sometimes seen as designated attackers in a general election campaign, theoretically allowing the presidential nominee to remain above the fray. But that framing is oversimplified in an election between Trump, who relishes attacking his critics in withering terms, and Biden, the former vice president who has pegged his White House to a moral and competency argument against the Republican incumbent.
Trump himself offered the main counter to Biden last Thursday before Biden’s acceptance speech as the nominee. In a move aimed directly at his Democratic rival, the president traveled to Pennsylvania to greet supporters near Biden’s boyhood home in Scranton.
Democrats see Harris as being able to excite Black women and other minority women, but also as a credible messenger to white independents and moderate Republicans unhappy with Trump, especially white college-educated women.
“He reminds me of that guy in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’” she said on the September debate stage. “When you pull back the curtain, it’s a really small dude.”
Trump and his Republican allies have tried to cast Harris as an ultra-liberal helping the far left control the Democratic Party and the more centrist Biden.