MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump told his supporters Kamala Harris “hates you” as he charged she can’t answer a question, is a “dummy,” “cracks under pressure” and is a “weak person.”
Five miles away at her own rally, Harris warned her backers that Trump is “not done” after his picks for the U.S. Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and would seek to impose a national abortion ban, restrict access to birth control and put IVF treatments at risk.
Speaking at the Wisconsin State Fair Park Exposition Center in West Allis, Harris called on her backers to “finally turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump trying to keep us divided.”
“I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress,” Harris said.
Trump during his rally at Fiserv Forum, where he accepted the GOP nomination in July, offered a warning of the dire consequences he said the country would face if Harris is elected as he railed on Joe Biden’s policies for the southern border. He charged Harris has the economic “understanding of a child” and is “rattled” at this point in the campaign.
“We can’t go through another person who’s a dummy,” Trump said. “You wouldn’t put Kamala Harris even in charge of a kindergarten class.”
Wisconsin is one of a handful of states that will decide the presidency, and both tickets have swarmed the state with surrogates in the final days as polls have shown a nip-and-tuck race. Today was the second time this week that both nominees had dueling rallies in Wisconsin on the same day. On Wednesday, Trump was in Green Bay, while Harris was in Madison.
Tonight’s speeches were a contrast in many ways. Harris took the stage not long after the 9 p.m. start her campaign had promoted and wrapped up her remarks in less than half an hour, while Trump was an hour late and spoke for nearly 90 minutes.
Harris’ West Allis speech largely followed a similar script to the one she delivered a few hours earlier in Little Chute, while Trump’s was typical of his free-wheeling style. As he often does, Trump disputed suggestions that he rambles during his speeches, instead insisting it’s part of a “weave” that comes from his “very fertile brain.”
Trump promised to create jobs in Wisconsin if elected, saying multiple times that the current economy was “like a depression.”
“Four days before the election, they have among the worst numbers ever in history,” Trump said. “I stand before you today as the only candidate who can rescue our economy from total obliteration and restore it to strength.”
He charged that immigrants are taking jobs from African Americans, Hispanic Americans and union workers.
“The African American job picture is unbelievable, and we had it going so good, but they’ve come in illegally, and they’ve taken the jobs and people that have had jobs for 20 years,” Trump said.
Milwaukee was Harris’ third stop of the day in Wisconsin. She first hit Janesville, once the site of a major General Motors plant, to knock Trump as “no friend of labor.” Flanked by union workers, Harris slammed Trump over his promise that Foxconn would invest tens of billions in southeastern Wisconsin and create 13,000, neither of which came to fruition.
With polls showing Harris trailing Joe Biden’s marks with rank-and-file union members, the vice president told those in the crowd that she was there to “remind all the brothers and sisters of labor about who Donald Trump really is.” She bemoaned what she called “misinformation about what he is and who he stands with.”
“Here’s the bottom line: Donald Trump’s track record is a disaster for working people, and he is an existential threat to America’s labor movement,” Harris said.
She followed that stop with one in Little Chute, in the Fox Valley. The area is part of the “BOW counties” that runs along the Fox River Valley. Trump won all three countries in 2020, but Dems are looking to eat into his margins there.
Harris pledged to be a president who will work across the aisle, not one who would seek to punish his enemies as she said Trump has done.
Harris cast the election as about the “promise of America.” That, she said, includes the “women who refuse to accept a future without reproductive freedom and the men who support them.” It also includes Republicans who are “putting the Constitution of the United States” above party and voting for a Dem for the first time in their lives.
“The promise of America is all around us,” she said.
