Harris and Trump campaigns rapidly trade attacks over gender
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US Vice-President Kamala Harris attacked former president Donald Trump on Oct 31 for claiming at a rally that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not”.
PHOTO: AFP
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WASHINGTON – US Vice-President Kamala Harris attacked former president Donald Trump on Oct 31 for claiming at a rally that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not”, trying to elevate her opponent’s track record with female voters even as the Trump campaign lashed out at billionaire Mark Cuban, a top Harris surrogate, for insulting the intelligence of women close to the former president.
It was another hairpin turn that took the presidential race from literal trash talk to gender issues in its closing stage, with both candidates trying to inflict political wounds that will take days to heal as Americans cast their votes.
Ms Harris, speaking from Wisconsin on the morning of Oct 31 before leaving for campaign stops in the western part of the country, said Trump’s comments, made the evening earlier at a rally near Green Bay, constituted a “very offensive” message to all Americans.
Within minutes, the Trump campaign fired back.
“Why does Kamala Harris take issue with President Trump wanting to protect women, men and children from migrant crime and foreign adversaries?” Ms Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement.
On Oct 30, Trump had rolled into a Green Bay-area rally sitting in the passenger seat of a garbage truck and tried to tie Ms Harris to comments made this week by President Joe Biden, who appeared to call the Republican nominee’s supporters “garbage”
But after Trump told the crowd that his advisers had urged him to stop using a well-worn rally line about his desire to protect women, saying they had called it “inappropriate”, the Harris campaign saw an opportunity to throw the focus of a race that has been divided along gender lines squarely back onto her opponent.
“This is the same man who said women should be punished for their choices,” Ms Harris said at her rally in Phoenix on Oct 31, after repeating Trump’s comment to a chorus of boos from the crowd, which the campaign said numbered more than 7,000.
“He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly. But we trust women.”
She urged Arizonans to vote for a proposition that would enshrine access to abortion until foetal viability – about 24 weeks – in the state’s constitution, a change from the state’s current 15-week ban on the procedure.
“To protect your right to make your own healthcare decisions, I would recommend you vote ‘yes’ on Proposition 139,” Ms Harris said.
Fallout from Trump’s Oct 27 rally in New York continued
As election day nears, Ms Harris has tried to appeal to moderate Republican and independent women, particularly in the suburbs, by talking about her support for reproductive rights and casting Trump as a threat to them.
Ms Harris was holding back-to-back rallies on Oct 31. After Phoenix, she was to campaign in Reno, Nevada, and in Las Vegas, where she was to appear with singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who is of Puerto Rican descent. Lopez is among a flood of Hispanic celebrities who signed on to help the Harris campaign in the days after Trump’s rally in New York.
Trump, for his part, kicked off the next leg of his campaign with a visit to New Mexico, a notable detour from the top battleground states to one that rejected him by more than 10 percentage points four years ago. He will then also travel to Las Vegas and Phoenix, major cities in crucial states.
Trump’s choice to hold a rally at the airport in Albuquerque raised eyebrows from political observers, given that New Mexico has not voted for a Republican since 2004, and he lost by large margins in 2016 and 2020.
He offered two explanations from the stage – a false claim about New Mexico’s elections, and that the stop was “good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community”.
He then made a number of broad observations about Hispanic voters and polled the crowd on whether he should use the term “Hispanic” or “Latino” to refer to them.
“I love Hispanics, and they’re hard workers, and, boy, are they entrepreneurial, and they’re great people, and they are warm,” Trump said during a meandering 90-minute speech. “Sometimes they’re too warm, if you want to know the truth.”
As Trump has tried to project confidence in his national appeal, he has made occasional trips to blue states that opposed him in his past two elections.
He used New Mexico to make vague promises to address the cost of living, vowing an executive order “on Day 1” that would order federal agencies to “remove every single burdensome regulation driving up” prices and said he would create a Cabinet position for someone to oversee efforts “to reduce the cost of living”.
While Trump continued to knock Democrats over Biden’s “garbage” remark, the Trump campaign, eager to cut into Ms Harris’ polling advantage with women, saw an opportunity on Oct 31.
His team seized on comments that Mr Cuban, who has been campaigning for Ms Harris, made on The View arguing that Trump was never surrounded by “strong, intelligent women”.
Ms Susie Wiles, effectively one of Trump’s two co-campaign managers, responded with a rare public statement on social media.
Mr Cuban, she wrote on the platform X, “needs help identifying the strong and intelligent women surrounding Pres. Trump. Well, here we are!”
A Trump adviser, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said the campaign viewed Mr Cuban’s remark as a condescending statement in the vein of Mr Biden’s “garbage” remark, and that Ms Wiles’ post was part of a coordinated effort to amplify it.
Mr Cuban later tried to qualify his comments.
“I’m not saying that Republican women who vote for him aren’t smart and intelligent and strong. Many are,” he said after a small-business event in Atlanta, mentioning Ms Kellyanne Conway and Ms Elaine Chao, who served in the Trump administration.
But he argued that such Republican women rarely played starring roles at the former president’s campaign events. “You don’t see him on the trail side by side with anybody. So they can jump on it all they want.”
In Ms Harris’ remarks with reporters, she expanded her criticism of Trump beyond gender and also warned that he would again try to eliminate the Affordable Care Act if given a second term.
As president, he tried and failed to repeal the healthcare law, which has since become popular with a majority of Americans.
Ms Harris nodded to remarks this week by Speaker Mike Johnson, an ally of Trump’s, in which he said Republicans would pursue “massive reform” of the Act if the former president won. Mr Johnson, she said, would provide “further validation” of Trump’s efforts.
“Healthcare for all Americans is on the line in this election,” she said.
On Oct 31, Mr Johnson sought to clarify his comments, which included an apparent agreement with a voter who asked if there would be “no Obamacare” if Trump won and Republicans controlled Congress. “No Obamacare,” Mr Johnson replied.
His tone was different in interviews on Oct 31.
“They took a clip out of context and said that I said that we were promising to repeal Obamacare,” Mr Johnson said during an appearance on the Fox Business Network. “That’s just not what I said. It’s actually the opposite of that.”
The former president hit back at Ms Harris on his social media site.
“Lyin’ Kamala is giving a news conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act,” Trump wrote. “I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing. She also said I want to end Social Security. Likewise, never mentioned it, or thought of it.”
As president, Trump repeatedly sought to overturn the Affordable Care Act. In his current campaign, he has expressed interest in replacing the act and supporting cuts to entitlement programmes, including Social Security and Medicare.
But Ms Harris spent the bulk of her time on Oct 31 highlighting Trump’s remarks about keeping women safe even against their will, an approach he cast as paternal. Women in the crowd at his rally screamed their approval, but Democrats roundly criticised the comments.
In her remarks to reporters, Ms Harris said Trump’s statement was “offensive to everybody, by the way”.
Her campaign also sought to highlight comments about Roe versus Wade made by Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, including Mr Vance’s claim that supporters of abortion rights were “trying to celebrate” the procedure.
In response, Rogan said: “I think there’s very few people that are celebrating, though.”
The remarks about protecting women have threatened to further upend Trump’s closing message to American voters.
The comments evoked his past use of or misogynistic words toward women, a civil court case that found him liable for sexual abuse and the accounts of roughly two dozen women who have said he had abused or attacked them.
His first presidential race was rocked in October 2016, when leaked audio from a past appearance on Access Hollywood caught him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals, remarks he later dismissed as “locker room banter”.
In civil proceedings, Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll
