(AFP) – Democratic White House candidate Kamala Harris campaigned Thursday with Liz Cheney, a high-profile Republican opponent of Donald Trump who urged Americans to reject the ex-president’s “depraved cruelty” and elect his rival. Vice President Harris was joined onstage in the swing state of Wisconsin by the former congresswoman as the daughter of conservative former vice president Dick Cheney pleaded with moderate Republicans and independents to put patriotism over partisanship.
With just 33 days left in the extraordinary 2024 campaign, Harris “is standing in the breach in a critical moment in our nation’s history,” Cheney told the crowd in Ripon, the symbolic birthplace of the Republican Party in 1854. “I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump. And I ask you instead to help us elect Kamala Harris for president,” she said, to loud cheers and chants of “Thank you Liz!” Calling Cheney a “true patriot,” Harris thanked the Republican for her courage and “the conviction to speak truth.”
Hours before the pair took the stage, Trump rallied supporters in another closely-fought Midwestern battleground, Michigan, where he reprised the false claims of election fraud that led to the deadly violence. His appearance came in the wake of a bombshell filing Wednesday in his prosecution for an alleged criminal plot to subvert the 2020 election, which argued that he had no presidential immunity for the “private criminal effort” and provided new evidence of his alleged misconduct.
“We did great in 2016 — a lot of people don’t know. We did much better in 2020 — we won. We won, we did win. It was a rigged election,” Trump said of his seven-million-vote defeat to Joe Biden in a now-familiar refrain. Trump has been spreading debunked conspiracy theories about fraud in the 2020 election since before it was conducted, but there were multiple other egregious falsehoods from the Republican, who has a string of felony convictions and civil adjudications against him for dishonesty.
Trump repeatedly misled his audience about the Biden administration’s response to the deadly hurricane which has devastated parts of the southeast, misrepresented migrant crime statistics, and impugned the mental health of Harris and two senior Democratic lawmakers. The former reality TV star was delivering his remarks in the rust-belt Michigan county of Saginaw that he won in 2016 and then narrowly lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
The “Rust Belt” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are among seven battlegrounds that are expected to decide an agonizingly close 2024 election that’s just over a month away. Early voting has already begun in several states. Harris used her Wisconsin rally to reach out to Republicans whom Democrats hope are turned off by Trump’s extreme rhetoric on subjects ranging from abortion to migration and democracy.
She reminded Americans how Trump “recklessly tramples on our democratic values” and would likely do so again from the Oval Office should he win. “Donald Trump lost the 2020 election,” Harris said. “As you have heard and know, he refused to accept the will of the people and the results of an election that was free and fair.” The conservative Cheney was one of only 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump over the attacks on the Capitol by Trump supporters, who were trying to halt the certification of Trump’s defeat to Biden. She was thrown out of House Republican leadership for her opposition to Trump. Her father’s support for Harris came as a surprise.
– “Right to choose” – Harris has narrow leads in polls in Wisconsin and Michigan, but both candidates know that all the swing states could go either way and are hitting them relentlessly in the home stretch. One subject Trump avoided during his free-wheeling speech was former first lady Melania Trump’s new memoir and her comments on the hot-button election issue of abortion.
According to The Guardian, which said it had accessed a copy ahead of publication next week, Melania wrote that “restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body.” Her opinion diverges from Trump, who often brags that his US Supreme Court justice picks helped end the nationwide protection of abortion rights. The Harris campaign responded that “sadly for the women across America, Mrs. Trump’s husband firmly disagrees with her.”
Trump and Harris remain neck-and-neck ahead of the election, despite historic upheavals including Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee at the last minute in July and two assassination attempts against Trump.
– Kamil Krzaczynski, with Danny Kemp in Washington
© 2024 AFP
