CLOUD, Minn. - Former President Donald Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance will hold their first joint presidential rally in Minnesota on Saturday night at St. Cloud's Herb Brooks Arena. Tickets are still available for the event, with a maximum capacity of 6,000.
Trump’s weird poetry is unmatched. Neither is his sense of self importance.
Great predictable thinkers are often prescient in their pronouncements, and Hannah Arendt is one of the greats...
This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.
With such a people, you can do whatever you want.
—Hannah Arendt, German historian and philosopher (1906–1975 - Hannah’s words are ingrained in my mind as she died the same year as my sister Aga who died at the age of 22 )
Unhinged’ ‘Just plain weird’: Trump-Harris race gets nasty
The media is already failing in its duty to fairly cover Kamala Harris
Donald Trump has unleashed a barrage of attack lines against his likely new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he called his "new victim to defeat" and accused her of deceiving the public about President Joe Biden's ability to run for a second term.
The rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, marked his first public campaign event since Biden dropped out of the 2024 matchup and Harris became the Democrats' likely nominee.
The rally concluded minutes before Biden addressed the nation to explain he dropped his reelection bid to "pass the torch" to Harris, who is 22 years younger than him.
Donald Trump repeatedly mispronounces Kamala Harris at first rally since Biden's exit from 2024 race
Trump Tells Crowd 'You Won't Have To Vote' Again After Election In Bizarre Remarks
How Harris turned the tables on Trump
Many voters had been dreading a rerun of the 2020 election between two ageing men. Now they are being presented with a much sharper contrast
Using Beyoncé’s pop anthem “Freedom” as a soundtrack, Kamala Harris made her clearest pitch yet for the White House in a slick video posted to social media on Thursday.
“There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate,” the vice-president said, as images of Donald Trump flashed on the screen. “But us? We chose something different. We choose freedom.”
With around 100 days to go until November’s US presidential election, Harris’s first official campaign video allowed the vice-president to reintroduce herself to the American electorate, and previewed some of the messages that will underpin her nascent campaign for the presidency.
But it also laid bare the stark choice that Americans will face when they head to the ballot box in November.
Last week, the majority of US voters were dreading a rerun of the 2020 election that pitted the current and former president — two ageing white men — against each other. Now voters are being presented with a much sharper set of contrasts that cut across generations, gender and race.
While the Republicans will seek to frame Harris as a dangerous radical, Democrats will highlight the distinction between a 59-year-old one-time prosecutor and a 78-year-old former president who this year was found guilty by a jury of 34 criminal charges.
A Democratic establishment that was despondent in recent weeks is now elated at the possibility of elevating the first female president, the first Asian-American president and only the second Black president in US history.
Harris’s late entry into the race this week has shaken up an already historic US presidential contest. Joe Biden’s decision last weekend to suspend his re-election campaign and endorse his vice-president as his successor so deep into an election year is virtually unprecedented in modern political history. The last time a US president decided to forgo running for a second term was Lyndon B Johnson in March of 1968.
At the same time, Biden’s momentous choice to step aside came just one week after Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The last time a current or former US president had been shot was Ronald Reagan in 1981.
“There are decades when nothing happens, and days when decades happen,” says Bob Shrum, a professor at the University of Southern California and veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns. “We are living through the days when decades happen.”
The tumult of the past few weeks makes analysts and forecasters wary of drawing any snap conclusions about what Harris’s candidacy could mean for November’s election result.
“There is no good historical precedent for what is happening right now,” says Kyle Kondik of the non-partisan University of Virginia Center for Politics. “We are flying blind.”
But Harris’s bid for the White House has undeniably injected energy and enthusiasm into a Democratic party that for weeks was plagued by infighting over Biden’s age, fitness for office and plummeting poll numbers. In the first four days of her campaign alone, she raked in more than $126mn in campaign contributions and signed up more than 100,000 new volunteers.
Even the most exuberant Democrats acknowledge Harris faces a steep climb if she is to defeat Trump in November, in part because she has long suffered relatively low approval ratings — the latest Real Clear Politics average shows just 39 per cent of Americans approve of the job she is doing as vice-president. Trump has for months led in nationwide opinion polls, which tilted even more in his favour after Biden’s disastrous showing in the televised debate last month and the attempt on Trump’s life.
Yet surveys conducted this week suggest Harris is already performing better than Biden, narrowing Trump’s lead to within the margin of error. A New York Times/Siena College poll out on Thursday showed Harris trailing Trump by just one point, 48-47, among likely voters — a virtual tie. Earlier this month, in the aftermath of the debate performance that ultimately led to Biden’s downfall, the president trailed Trump by an eye-watering six points.
“Democrats needed a boost of optimism, and they got one,” says Kondik, adding: “[They] turned death into a fighting chance to live.”
Harris faces several significant political tests on the horizon, starting with the selection of a running mate, a decision that could come as soon as next week. The vice-president is reportedly vetting several possible partners, including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and several Democratic governors, namely Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, North Carolina’s Roy Cooper and Andy Beshear of Kentucky.
In mid-August, she will take centre stage and formally accept the Democratic nomination for president at the party’s national convention in Chicago.
And in September, she could face Trump on the debate stage, although the two campaigns are feuding over the date, moderators and format.
In the meantime, Harris faces a more immediate challenge: defining herself and her candidacy for the American public.
“The vice-presidency is an important office, but it is not the most visible office in the country,” notes Charles Franklin, a veteran pollster and director of the Marquette Law School Poll. “This is an opportunity for her to reintroduce herself to voters.”
“We have a candidate who is well known in terms of her name identification, but she is not really very well defined,” Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, said at an event this week at the University of Chicago Institute for Politics.
“She can deliver the message certainly much better than Biden did,” Walter added. “But how credible is she as a messenger? That is the real thing that will be tested.”
So far, Harris has echoed Biden’s arguments, albeit with a sharper message. Her pitch to voters has been largely focused on making the case against Trump, and depicting herself and the Democratic party as the guardians of liberty, especially when it comes to abortion.
Reproductive rights is an issue that has proved to be an election winner for the Democrats since the US Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022.
But party insiders believe Harris will be a more effective champion of reproductive rights than Biden, an observant Catholic who earlier in his career favoured more restrictions on access to abortions.
While Trump has tried to moderate his position on the issue, Democrats are also likely to highlight the record of JD Vance, his running mate, who in the past has supported a national ban on terminations and opposed exceptions in the case of rape or incest.
Harris has largely inherited the Biden campaign apparatus and said this week that she would keep Jen O’Malley Dillon, the architect of Biden’s successful 2020 campaign, as chair of her own run for the White House.
One of the many problems that had been facing Biden’s campaign was Trump’s growing support among Black and Latino voters. In a memo this week O’Malley Dillon insisted that Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, would be able to galvanise support from Black voters, Latino voters, Asian-American voters and women voters in particular.
“This campaign will be close, it will be hard fought, but Vice-President Harris is in a position of strength — and she’s going to win,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.
The other contrast to Trump the Democrats are looking to highlight is her law and order background. In remarks to campaign staffers on Monday, Harris made clear that she would be leaning on her credentials as a San Francisco prosecutor, and later attorney-general of California, to go after 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,” Harris said, in what has become a fixture of her stump speech. “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Trump and the Republicans have also wasted no time in going after Harris, whom they have sought to paint as a dangerously leftwing Democrat whose politics are out of step with the mainstream. Many have pointed to a 2019 ranking from GovTrack, a firm that tracks congressional voting records, that named Harris the “most liberal” US senator.
“I really believe she’s a San Francisco radical. She’s actually, I think, a much worse, in a way, a much worse candidate than [Biden],” Trump told Fox News on Thursday. “She also wants to defund the police, and she really wants to do it more than any other person. She’s the most radical person probably that we’ve had in office, let alone the office of the presidency.”
Republican pollster Whit Ayres says that “the way they run against her is as a San Francisco liberal” who once held positions on energy and healthcare “that are way to the left of most Americans”. He adds: “Their least effective message is to go after her race and gender . . . That is going to blow up in their face. It is totally unnecessary.”
Trump and his allies have also sought to blame Harris for inflation and the influx of migrants at the US-Mexico border, two of Biden’s biggest political vulnerabilities.
“If the Republicans do their job and define her as being a radical Democrat and tie her to Joe Biden’s record . . . she will come back to Earth and sink like cement in water sometime after Labor Day,” says Florida Republican strategist Ford O’Connell, in reference to the US bank holiday at the start of September. “The Democrats are trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, and at the rate things are going, it will still be the same outcome.”
Harris ran for president once before, in a Democratic primary bid that began with great expectations at the start of 2019, but fizzled before the year was done. The then US senator dropped out of the race two months before the 2020 Iowa caucuses amid middling poll numbers, a cash crunch and an inability to make a compelling case for her candidacy.
But Democrats insist Harris has learnt the lessons from that campaign, when her history as “tough on crime” prosecutor worked against her as she tried to win over progressive Democratic voters. As a general election candidate this time around, Harris needs to win over moderates in the middle — and allies insist she has grown as a communicator and a candidate during her time in the Biden administration.
“Harris gave an extraordinary speech when she announced her run for president in 2019. But she never had a message,” recalls Shrum. “That is not a problem now. The message is about what is wrong with Trump, and about how she is fighting for people.”
The Corporate Wishcasting Attack on Lina Khan
Billionaires are hopeful that Kamala Harris will break from the FTC chair. But she’s part of an entire network of policymakers who are actually governing in Washington