Starring in Kamala Harris’ closing argument: Donald Trump

With the presidential race a dead heat two weeks before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is moving aggressively to make sure voters in the battlegrounds remember precisely why they rejected Donald Trump four years ago.

Gone is the euphoria of her joyful first weeks as the Democratic presidential nominee. She is no longer trying simply to diminish the former president. Now, he looms large. Literally.

“See for yourself,” she told a crowd in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, on Thursday, gesturing to two large television screens installed at the rally. “Let’s roll a clip.”

The video screens lit up with a 40-second montage of Trump bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade.

As Harris stood watching like a late-night host observing the audience’s reaction, the crowd booed and then began a chant of “Lock him up.” She gently stopped them before returning to her promises to restore and protect abortion rights.

Deploying his words as her sharpest weapons, Harris is pointing to Trump’s erratic behavior and increasingly outlandish and antidemocratic statements to paint him as unfit, unstable and, above all, too dangerous for another term. It is a closing argument she is hoping will persuade the dwindling number of undecided voters to help her defeat him.

“I do believe that Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Friday. “And the consequences of him ever getting back into the White House are brutally serious.”

Harris’ increasingly pointed attacks on the former president have been paired with her campaign’s methodical outreach to key constituencies that Democrats believe are repelled by Trump’s polarizing style and divisive rhetoric. She plans to spend the coming days wooing suburban women and moderates with a series of events featuring former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of the highest-profile Republicans to endorse her candidacy. Last week, she sought to connect with Black male voters through a series of policy rollouts and interviews, as part of an effort to remind some previously Democratic supporters why they rejected Trump before.

The strategy marks a return to Biden’s original tactic of amplifying Trump in order to force the contest into a referendum not on his administration, but the former president’s words and deeds. It’s a blueprint that helped drive big Democratic victories in 2018, 2020 and 2022. And his recent run of undisciplined behavior has given Harris ample material to highlight.

But it comes with a risk. Voters now view Trump slightly more favorably than they did when he left office, and surveys indicate that he is making inroads with new voters, including Black and Latino men, groups that could potentially be decisive on Election Day. His campaign has worked hard to project the impression that Trump is marching to an inevitable victory — even though nearly all available polling shows the race to be a dead heat — as it tries to push infrequent voters to the polls.

Trump’s allies say his approach, a swaggering romp through purple and blue states alike that will take him to Madison Square Garden next week, is going to work — even if they can’t quite say how or why.

“It’s like dealing with a giraffe or a panda; you can’t explain him in normal terms,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican. He added, “I think Trump has reason to believe that the strategy’s working.”

But Trump has been delivering winding speeches that have alarmed some allies, and he has doubled down on politically toxic threats to his opponents and a dark, apocalyptic message that helps to illustrate Harris’ point. Trump started the week with a town hall where he spent 39 minutes swaying silently onstage to his favorite songs, as if the evening’s planned activity, answering voters’ questions, was no longer necessary. And he finished it in Pennsylvania on Saturday with a lewd joke about a famous golfer’s genitals, while also using vulgarity to refer to Harris.

Over the course of the past six days, Harris has unleashed a barrage of attacks aimed at making Trump as unpalatable as possible. Her campaign is blanketing the airwaves with negative ads — the ad for Harris featured most in Nevada over the past week, for example, is a 30-second spot in which two of Trump’s former advisers describe him as “unstable,” according to the tracking firm AdImpact — but she is making the pitch in every forum she can find.

Last Monday, her campaign debuted a new video montage at her rallies featuring footage of Trump threatening to dispatch the military against liberals who oppose him and calling them the “enemy within.” The next day, she agreed with an interviewer who described Trump’s vision as fascism: “Yes, we can say that,” she told the radio host Charlamagne Tha God.

In Michigan, she questioned Trump’s stamina, citing reports that he was “exhausted” by the campaign trail. At campaign events in Wisconsin, she attacked him for comments describing the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol as a “day of love.”

And she took the fight directly onto the former president’s terrain, using an appearance on Fox News to cast him as “unfit” before a conservative audience unaccustomed to hearing such criticism.

“The American people have a concern about Donald Trump, which is why the people who know him best, including leaders of our national security community, have all spoken out,” she said Thursday on Fox News. “Even people who worked for him in the Oval Office, worked with him in the Situation Room, and have said he is unfit and dangerous and should never be president of the United States again.”

The shift in strategy reflects the apparent belief that, in a neck-and-neck sprint to the finish line, the best way to squeeze out every vote is to frame the race as a choice between Harris and an unacceptable opponent.

“If you’re going to win a close race, you do so on the margins,” said Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground states director, of the seven battleground states. He added: “We felt pretty confident that they would all be close. And sure enough, here we are.”

For Trump, the stakes reach beyond the next election: The former president is running not only for the White House but also to remain a free man. Should he lose, he may very well face jail time.

With views of Trump largely cemented, the burden is on Harris to prove herself to undecided voters, according to some Republicans.

“Trump’s going to do what Trump’s going to do, but the question is, what is Kamala Harris doing differently that’s unique, that’s forward thinking and that’s a big ‘aha’ moment that gives swing voters in Georgia and across the country permission to vote for her?” said Stephen Lawson, a Republican strategist in Georgia.

Harris, who often calls herself the underdog, has been predicting that she will draw in just enough of them.

“Make no mistake,” she said Friday in Michigan, “we will win.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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