Trump keeps it personal as Harris basks in poll surge

Donald Trump launched fresh personal attacks against White House rival Kamala Harris on Saturday, as new polling showed her making major gains in key battleground states ahead of next week’s Democratic National Convention.
Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump began by blaming Vice-President Harris for unleashing “devastating” inflation – one of the biggest issues of the campaign – but he soon drifted off script, mocking Harris’s laugh and calling her a “communist” and a “lunatic”.
At one point, criticising a portrait of Harris on the cover of Time magazine, Trump insisted he was “much better looking than her”.
Republicans and Trump advisers – concerned by Harris’s energised campaign – have publicly urged him to stick to the issues and lay off the personal attacks which they believe play badly with the undecided and independent voters he needs to win the November 5 election.
However, the former president has shown no sign of changing his populist, confrontational style.
“You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter for a second, do you?” he asked the crowd about 15 minutes into his speech, before proceeding to reel off a now familiar list of insults at Harris.
“People say, please don’t use bad language. Please don’t call people stupid,” Trump declared, adding: “Please, don’t call her a lunatic. And I said, but that’s what she is, she’s a lunatic.”
He also said that he believed Harris will be easier to beat than President Joe Biden, even as some polls showed her edging ahead in the race for the November 5 presidential election.
“I believe she will be easier to beat than him,” said Trump.
The momentum in the White House race has shifted dramatically since Biden abruptly pulled out on July 21, with Harris’s whirlwind entry enthusing the Democratic Party base.
A survey by the New York Times and Siena College published on Saturday had Harris storming back into contention in four critical battleground states that Trump had looked set to win comfortably against Biden.
The poll will likely trigger further consternation in Trump’s campaign team, with the vice-president now ahead in Arizona and North Carolina, and getting closer in Nevada and Georgia.
At the rally on Saturday in Wilkes-Barre, Trump skewered Harris on her historic opposition to fracking – an unpopular stance in Pennsylvania which is the second-largest natural gas-producing US state after Texas.
However, he spent far longer reviewing his debate performance against Biden back in June, and on meandering anecdotes about everyone from Italian screen legend Sophia Loren to French President Emmanuel Macron.
In a meandering speech, Trump repeated his false claim that he lost the 2020 election due to fraud, dismissed the threat of climate change and said his plan to impose across-the-board tariffs on foreign goods would not act as a tax on US consumers, an assertion that most economists contest.
The Mohegan Sun Arena, where Trump appeared, has a capacity of roughly 8,000 and was nearly full when he started speaking.
However, the crowd began to thin after the one-hour mark. He spoke for more than 100 minutes in total.
With polls showing the head-to-head race very close, it is the swing states – especially Pennsylvania – that will decide the final result under the US electoral college system.
Trump lost the state by a narrow margin against Biden in 2020 but has strong support in rural areas and small towns.
A separate New York Times/Siena poll last week showed Harris narrowly ahead in Pennsylvania and the two other northern battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
Harris was in Pennsylvania yesterday, making several stops on her campaign bus near Pittsburgh before heading to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention that opens today (see lead story above).
She will be hoping to sustain her poll momentum at the four-day event which will include keynote speeches from party leaders like Biden and former president Barack Obama.
Harris will round out the proceedings on Thursday evening, with her own speech to formally accept the party nomination.
Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by about 44,000 votes, a margin of less than one percentage point, while Biden prevailed by just over 80,000 votes in 2020, a 1.2-point margin.
Both campaigns have made the state a top priority, blanketing the airwaves with advertisements.
Of the more than $110mn spent on advertising in seven battleground states since Biden dropped out in late July, roughly $42mn was in Pennsylvania, more than twice any other state, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing data from the tracking site AdImpact.
Democratic and Republican groups have already reserved $114mn in ad time in Pennsylvania from late August through the election, more than twice as much as the $55mn reserved in Arizona, the next highest total, according to AdImpact.
The Harris campaign said on Saturday that it planned to spend at least $370mn on digital and television ads nationwide between the Labour Day holiday on September 2 and Election Day.
With election day rapidly approaching, Harris is trying to distance herself from unpopular Biden policies, while getting ahead of Trump’s attempts to brand her a liberal extremist.
The past week has seen the two sides home in on voters’ worries about the economy.
Trump hammered the vice-president on Saturday, saying that her push for a federal ban on price-gouging by companies that unfairly raise prices was the sort of policy favoured by communist countries.
On Friday, Harris held an event in North Carolina to unveil a series of proposals to ease the burden of post-coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic inflation.
She noted that the US economy was booming while conceding that “many Americans don’t yet feel that progress in their daily lives”.
“Donald Trump fights for billionaires and large corporations,” she said. “I will fight to give money back to working- and middle-class Americans.”