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Vice President Kamala Harris used her first fundraiser since becoming the likely Democratic candidate for the White House to sharply criticize the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as determined to limit the freedoms of Americans.
Harris traveled to Pittsfield on Saturday, where her campaign said she expected to boost greater than $1.4 million from an audience of tons of on the Colonial Theater, greater than $1 million greater than the event's original goal before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
She told an excited crowd of supporters that she entered the race as an “underdog” while expressing confidence that her upstart campaign could defeat Trump.
“I will fight to move our nation forward,” Harris said. “Donald Trump intends to set our country back.”
Harris also made jabs at Trump and his vice presidential candidate, the senator. JD Vancefor making strange attacks on her and other Democrats. The vice chairman appeared to allude to a 2021 interview with Vance wherein he criticized some distinguished Democrats without biological children, including Harris, as “childless female cats” without “direct share” in America.
“You may have noticed that Donald Trump has resorted to some wild lies about my record, and some of the things he and his running mate are saying are just plain weird,” Harris said. “I mean, that's the box you put it in, right?”
Harris' branding of Republicans as “weird” appears to be a part of a concerted effort by her campaign to portray a few of Trump and Vance's rhetoric as questionable. Earlier this week, the Harris campaign called out Vance on the social media site X “strange and creepy” for a few of his positions on women's reproductive rights. Trump has, meanwhile, mentioned the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs” in campaign speeches.
“These guys are just weird,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who’s on Harris's vice presidential shortlist, said in an MSNBC interview earlier this week. “They're running for the He-Man Club of misogynists or something.”
Supporters of the fundraiser included musician James Taylor and diverse Democratic heavyweights within the state, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, former Governor Deval Patrick and Representative Richie Neal.
Harris raised greater than $100 million in the primary 48 hours after Biden dropped out of the race – a brand new presidential record – and her aides said she continues to boost money at a gradual pace.
“This is a campaign that is driven by the people,” Harris said. “And we have momentum.”
Harris, a former prosecutor in her home state of California, also mocked Trump for his legal troubles, citing his recent conviction on 34 cases of falsification of business documents In New York, a jury found the previous president guilty of liable for the sexual abuse of recommendation columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996 and a settlement of $25 million paid to participants of the now defunct real estate seminar called Trump University.
“I've dealt with people like him my entire career,” Harris said. She added, “So in this campaign, and I say this in all seriousness, I will measure my record against his at all times.”
Harris began her remarks by praising Biden, who decided last weekend to withdraw his re-election bid and endorse Harris after his campaign fell apart following his disastrous performance on the June 27 debate against Trump.
She described Biden's achievements over the past three and a half years as “unprecedented in modern history.”
In a keynote speech at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville on Saturday, Trump denigrated Harris as a “radical left-wing lunatic” who desires to defund the police.
He said that while she was worse than Biden, she was probably the second favorite candidate he would run against after Biden.
Trump told the numerous Bitcoin supporters that he would embrace the cryptocurrency much more strongly than the Biden-Harris administration, promising to “replace economic stagnation under Biden and Harris with an economic boom.”
The vice chairman told her supporters at her fundraiser in Massachusetts that her economic program was in sharp contrast to Trump's. Trump's focus was clearly on lowering tax rates for wealthy Americans and improving corporate profits, she claimed.
“Building the middle class will be the defining goal of my presidency,” Harris said. She added: “Let's face it, this campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump. Our campaign has always been about two very different visions for our nation.”
The Vice President's office also announced that Harris will travel to Atlanta on Tuesday for a campaign event and can travel to Houston on Thursday to attend a memorial service for Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, 74, a longtime Democratic member of the House of Representatives who died on July 20.
Jackson Lee, who suffered from pancreatic cancer, led the federal government's efforts to guard women from domestic violence and to acknowledge Juneteenth Day as a national holiday.
image credit : www.boston.com