(AFP) – Democratic White House candidate Kamala Harris teamed up Thursday with Liz Cheney, a high-profile Republican opponent of Donald Trump who voted to impeach the former president for inciting the 2021 assault on the Capitol. Hours before the pair were onstage in the key swing state of Wisconsin, Trump rallied supporters in another closely-fought 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 lost to Joe Biden by a narrow margin in 2020. The three “Rust Belt” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are among seven battleground states that are expected to decide an agonizingly close 2024 election that’s just over a month away.
Surrounded by workers from the Teamsters auto workers’ union, Trump reminisced about how he used to “hate” paying employees overtime and bragged about how he managed to get out of it. “I shouldn’t tell you this. I’d go out and get other people and let them work regular time,” he said.
Harris was due to appear for an early evening event in the symbolic birthplace of the Republican Party in Ripon with Cheney, the former congresswoman who has switched sides to back the Democrat along with her father, former vice president Dick Cheney. Current vice president Harris will be using her 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.
The conservative Liz 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. Liz Cheney was thrown out of the leadership of the US House for her opposition to Trump. Her father’s support, meanwhile, came as a surprise from the former right-hand man to President George W. Bush.
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 with just 33 days until the election. One subject Trump avoided during a free-wheeling speech was his 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 Supreme Court justice picks paved the way for the end of the national right to abortion in the United States. 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. – Danny KEMP
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