Vice President Kamala Harris will make her “closing argument” to voters on Tuesday, one week from Election Day, at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., the same site where then-President Donald Trump rallied his supporters ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
With the White House as her backdrop, Harris will use the speech to paint a stark contrast between herself and the former president, according to a senior campaign official familiar with the planning around the speech. Harris, the official said, will urge Americans to turn the page — one of the vice president’s oft-used refrains on the campaign trail — from Trump and embark on a new way forward.
According to excerpts from her prepared remarks, Harris will not shy away from criticizing Trump, instead invoking his pledge to pardon those convicted after the Jan. 6 attack, as well as his call for the National Guard or U.S. military to be deployed on Election Day to handle “the enemy from within," to contrast herself against the former president. She'll attack Trump as "unstable," "obsessed with revenge" and charge that he's "out for unchecked power."
"Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That’s who he is," Harris is set to say. "But America, I am here tonight to say: that’s not who we are."
Harris will tell the crowd in D.C. that she offers a "different path" from Trump, promising to "seek common ground and common sense solutions" and "always put country above party and above self."
"I pledge to seek common ground and common sense solutions to make your lives better," the vice president is set to say. "I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress. I pledge to listen to experts. To those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. And to people who disagree with me.
"Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy," Harris is set to continue. "He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table. And I pledge to be a President for all Americans. To always put country above party and above self."
"Tonight's going to be a major moment for the vice president as she frames her final pitch to voters across the country," said Harris campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond. "She'll approach this moment as she has her entire career as a prosecutor: She's given an open argument to the voters, spent the last three months laying out the evidence, the facts, and now she'll make her closing argument directly to the American people, or the jury. And that's who's going to decide the outcome of this election. And that's how it should be."
Richmond made the case that Harris will highlight a "clear choice" between herself and Trump, which she will pose as a binary decision "between Trump and his obsession with himself vs. her new generation of leadership that is focused on the American people."
In the last several days on the campaign trail, Harris has sought to remind voters that either her or Trump will take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in just a few weeks, telling supporters that Trump “will sit in the Oval Office stewing, plotting revenge, retribution, writing out his enemies list,” while she will be focused on bringing prices down for families.
“[Trump] is focused and actually fixated on his grievances, on himself, and on dividing our country, and it is not in any way something that will strengthen the American family, the American worker. It is nothing about what he is saying that is actually going to support the aspirations, the dreams and the ambitions of the American people,” Harris told reporters Monday before heading to Michigan, in reaction to Trump’s event at Madison Square Garden over the weekend.
“As I've said many times, I'll say tomorrow night in my speech, there's a big difference between him and I. If he were elected on day one, he's going to be sitting in the Oval Office working on his enemies list on day one. If I am elected president of the United States, which I fully intend to be, I will be working on behalf of the American people on my to-do list.”
Advisers to the vice president believe that the site of the Ellipse will evoke memories of Trump’s Jan. 6 address, where he falsely claimed that the 2020 election was “rigged” and encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell" or "you're not going to have a country anymore.”
“We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue … and we’re going to the Capitol,” Trump said in his address almost four years ago, adding: “We’re going to try and give our Republicans — the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help — we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” (Trump did, however, encourage his supporters to march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically” in his address.)
Trump’s supporters then marched down to the U.S. Capitol, and a mob stormed the building in an effort to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s win over Trump in the 2020 election. More than 100 police officers were injured in the attack, five people died at the Capitol and more than 1,500 people have been charged with crimes in connection with the attack. Over 1,000 have pleaded guilty or been tried and convicted.
Richmond said that Harris will "use the powerful symbolism of the location to remind Americans that Trump is someone so all-consumed by his grievances and his power and his endless desire for revenge that he is not focused on the needs of the American people."
Trump, who has vowed to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters if he’s elected, recently called the attack a “day of love.” He faces four felony charges brought by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith in relation to his efforts to overturn the election results, which prosecutors say culminated in the attack.
Trump pleaded not guilty and has denied wrongdoing.
Richmond and other officials noted that Harris will talk about her plans to lower costs for the American people, as well as "the reproductive health care crisis that Donald Trump has created" by appointing three Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.
“She's going to lay out two futures for the country, because clearly, this election is a choice: on one hand, we have Donald Trump, his second term is going to be even worse than his last,” said senior spokesperson Lauren Hitt in an interview with Spectrum News, pointing to former Trump staffers such as former Chief of Staff John Kelly who have expressed concern about Trump’s fitness for office.
“We know that his second term is going to be even worse than that, because those people, the last time they're gone now, and many of them have endorsed the vice president because they know how serious the threat of Donald Trump is," she said.
Hitt said Harris will also use the speech to lay out the agenda of what a first term Harris presidency would look like.
“She wants to chart a new way forward, she wants to create an economy where people don't just get by, they actually get ahead – what she's calling an opportunity economy, where we expand the child tax credit so people have the money they need to care for their baby in that first year of life. We know it's such an expensive year, we want to make it easier for people to buy a car seat and a bassinet and all those things you need in that [baby’s] first year, and so much more,” explained Hitt.
“What people are going to hear on Tuesday [is a] really stark choice between a Kamala Harris first term and a Donald Trump return to the past.”
Spectrum News' Justin Tasolides contributed to this report.