At South Florida rally, Trump cycles through new attacks on Harris

Former President Donald Trump tested out new attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris in front of a conservative audience on Friday evening, linking her to Biden administration policies on immigration and crime, with additional jabs at the state of California — and the pronunciation of her name.

Trump’s address on friendly turf at the conservative Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit was in many ways a run of his frequent hits — that the 2020 election was “rigged,” the end of Roe v. Wade was something “everybody” wanted, and the U.S. has become a “dumping ground” for criminals from other countries.

The former president’s hour-long address was his second public speech since President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris, and showcased Trump’s efforts to regroup in real time against his new Democratic opponent.

In the past few days, a rush of new polls have shown a much closer race between Trump and Harris than Trump and Biden, and Republicans have struggled to settle on lines of attack against her. At a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, many of the former president’s supporters acknowledged he now had a tougher race on his hands. And his campaign signaled Thursday that he might back out of a previously planned Sept. 10 presidential debate, which would now feature Harris instead of Biden.

In his address in West Palm Beach on Friday, Trump took credit for Biden stepping down from the ticket, which came weeks after the president’s disastrous debate performance. But Trump turned his focus more to Harris, beginning by calling her a “bum three weeks ago.”

As he ran through a range of familiar campaign issues at the summit, billed as an event to “unite Christians across America,” Trump threw out attacks at Harris on each one. On immigration, he called her the “border czar” — a term Republicans have sought to attach to her diplomatic assignment working with Central American countries to address causes of migration, and that Democrats have tried to distance her from. Later, he suggested that Turning Point’s next conference might as well be held in Caracas, Venezuela, because crime had dropped there while that country’s criminals had left for the U.S.

He also sought to link Harris to a recently passed California law that bans school districts from outing trans children, saying she supported “trampling on parental rights.” And he tossed around several pronunciations of her first name, Kamala, over the night, saying he “couldn't care less” if he mispronounced it.

He argued the vice president would appoint a “hardcore Marxist” to the Supreme Court — contrasting that with the three “courageous” justices he appointed, citing their decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. He also defended that landmark 2022 decision as “what the pro-life movement fought to get for 50 years” and something that “all legal scholars” wanted, accusing Harris of supporting extreme abortion policies.

Trump also argued that protesters who sprayed pro-Hamas graffiti in Washington on Wednesday were “Kamala Harris supporters,” although Harris condemned them. And he accused Harris, whose husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish, of “not liking Jewish people,” and questioned how Jews or Catholics in the U.S. can vote for Democrats.

“With four more years of Harris, who was worse than Joe Biden in a true sense, and far more liberal, America will be decimated by migrant crime, demolished by fascism, ravaged by rampant inflation and impoverished by the complete obliteration of American energy,” he said.

In a statement, Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer said Trump “generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant — let alone be President of the United States.”

“America can do better than the bitter, bizarre, and backward-looking delusions of criminal Donald Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris offers a vision for America's future focused on freedom, opportunity, and security,” Singer said.

Concluding his remarks, Trump told the audience that it was important for Christians to get out and vote in November.

Four years from now, he argued, the country will be “fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”