As Democrats prepared for a deeply symbolic night to mark the passing of the generational torch, former President Donald Trump remained fixated on his former opponent.
Trump’s campaign has pushed sharply against Vice President Kamala Harris, launching a weeklong swing-state tour in tightly controlled environments with small crowds. The goal is to counterprogram the Democratic convention by leveling the kinds of policy-based attacks the former president’s allies have urged him to focus on in recent weeks.
But for Trump, who advisers say left the GOP convention confident of a comfortable victory in November, letting President Joe Biden go hasn’t been easy.
One adviser, asked if he expected Trump to watch Biden’s speech Monday evening, said simply: “Of course.”
He posts on social media about Biden’s decision to step down – and the Democratic pressure that drove the decision – with regularity. He frequently floated, with no evidence or credibility, the idea that Biden would try to step back into the race until a virtual Democratic roll call nominating Harris made that scenario impossible.
“I think he’s a little nostalgic for where things were a month ago,” said a Republican who has spoken to Trump in the last few days. “Understandably.”
Trump’s first battleground-state event of the week, in front of roughly 150 people in a York, Pennsylvania, manufacturing plant earlier Monday, marked a clear – if somewhat nonplussed – effort to stick closely to the economic and energy-focused remarks his advisers wanted him to give.
But Trump asked to add a section to the policy remarks a few hours before the event.
House Republicans had released a lengthy report making the case for Biden’s impeachment. After months of investigation, the report largely fell flat and contained no evidence that Biden, as vice president, had engaged in activities to benefit his son’s business partners.
Trump, however, insisted on adding paragraphs to his remarks summarizing his view of the findings.
“I said, ‘No, I want to talk about it, just briefly.’ It’s so sad, because he’s going to be making his speech tonight, and they don’t call him ‘Crooked Joe’ for no reason,” Trump said in York.
The former president also levied personal attacks against Harris during his speech and at one point focused on her father, Donald Harris, a retired Stanford University economist.
“He’s a Marxist professor. Can you imagine? Does anyone know that? I wonder if they knew that when they did an overthrow or a coup on Joe Biden. I wonder if they knew where she comes from, where she came from, what her ideology is. But you could see it a little bit by this wack job,” Trump said of Harris and her father.
The comments about where Harris “comes from” follow Trump’s repeated false attacks on the vice president’s racial identity. He falsely said last month that Harris – the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India – was “only promoting Indian heritage” and that she only recently “happened to turn Black.” Harris has long embraced and discussed her Black identity, while also honoring her Indian heritage.
Trump also attacked Harris’ laugh, which he has mocked repeatedly.
“Between his movement and her laugh, there’s a lot of craziness,” Trump said of Biden and Harris. “I’d say a step further than weird. Weird is a nice word by comparison,” the former president added, referencing the recent attack line from Harris and other Democrats that Trump and running mate JD Vance are “weird.”
As Trump stood on the floor of the manufacturing plant in York, seeking to portray himself as an ally of manufacturing workers, he said Harris’ economic policies amounted to a “regulatory jihad to shut down power plants all across America.”
Trump also falsely claimed that he “won” the classified documents case and that he was “totally exonerated” after US District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case against him. Cannon ruled last month that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges against Trump, violated the Constitution. But Cannon did not rule on whether Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents was proper or not.
In a battleground state where natural gas drives much of the economy, the former president on Monday repeatedly attacked Harris over her past support for a ban on fracking, saying that she was “totally a non-fracker.” As an unsuccessful candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris backed a ban on fracking, but her campaign now says she no longer supports such a prohibition.