Harris’ closing argument: Turn the page on Trump, and avert chaos

WASHINGTON — On Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump stood onstage at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House, and encouraged thousands of his supporters to fight to overturn an election he falsely claimed had been stolen.

“We fight like hell,” Trump said. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Droves of his backers then marched away and attacked the U.S. Capitol.

That angry image is exactly the one that Vice President Kamala Harris wants Americans to remember as she steps onstage around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Ellipse.

“Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That’s who he is,” Harris will say in her remarks, according to excerpts released by her office on Tuesday afternoon. “But America, I am here tonight to say: That’s not who we are.”

Standing at the Ellipse, with the White House in the backdrop behind her, Harris will deliver what her campaign is calling a closing argument that is meant to persuade still-undecided voters to consider what the future might look like if it holds another Trump term. She also wants those voters to consider what the future could look like under a Harris presidency.

“I pledge to seek common ground and common-sense solutions to make your lives better,” Harris is expected to say. “I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”

The vice president spent much of the day at a historic building in Washington, rehearsing the speech and delivering last-minute revisions as a core group of her advisers, including Adam Frankel, a lead speechwriter, and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the chair of her campaign, looked on.

“We know that there are still a lot of voters out there that are still trying to decide who to support or whether to vote at all,” O’Malley Dillon told reporters on a call Tuesday morning previewing the remarks. She said that Harris’ speech would be designed to reach a slice of the electorate that may be “exhausted” by the politics of the Trump era.

“She’s going to focus on talking about what her new generation of leadership really means,” O’Malley Dillon said, “and centering that around the American people.”

Before leaving Joint Base Andrews for a campaign trip to Michigan on Monday, Harris offered a preview of sorts when she was asked by reporters to respond to what transpired at a Trump rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York City a day earlier. Over the course of several hours, speakers there targeted Black people, Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Jews, Harris and other Democrats.

“That’s why people are exhausted with him,” Harris said before boarding Air Force Two, where she worked on the speech with advisers on the plane. “People are literally ready to turn the page.”

The promise of turning the page will be the framework for the most expansive address she has given as the Democratic presidential nominee, according to one adviser briefed on the text, who requested anonymity because the speech was not finalized yet.

Harris will spend a significant amount of time focused on running through her biography and her policy agenda, with an emphasis on plans to bring costs under control for many Americans. But Trump, and the threat she believes he poses, will remain at the spine of her argument.

The National Park Service is preparing for as many as 40,000 people to attend and hear Harris’ argument in person, according to a permit reviewed by The New York Times — a crowd that would be roughly twice the size of the capacity at Madison Square Garden.

“She has always been a voice for the people,” Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of the Harris campaign, told reporters on the call. “She has always talked about that her entire career, while Donald Trump has spent his entire career stamping his own name on stuff.”

Harris, her advisers said, will also make the argument that she represents a rejection of the coarsened and tribal politics of the past decade. According to a recent poll by the Times and Siena College, Americans are more likely to see Harris as a change candidate than Trump, who has refashioned the Republican Party in his image.

Of course, Harris enters the final stretch of her campaign with several vulnerabilities, including her loyalty to President Joe Biden on most of his policies, such as U.S. support of Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip. Biden is not expected to attend the speech at the Ellipse.

In recent weeks, Harris and her campaign have been careful to present her as a separate entity from Biden without undermining the president or his policies. And despite the coarsening of Trump’s language and his bizarre and at times vulgar behavior on the campaign trail, the race remains in a dead heat. The Times’ polling average shows the two candidates essentially tied in every battleground state.

But Harris campaign officials still believe they can peel away some persuadable Americans from the razor-thin category of undecided voters, particularly white, college-educated women who may be unwilling to vote for Trump. In recent days, Harris has visited Texas and Michigan to underscore the threats to reproductive health care in Republican-led states across the country. She has invited doctors and women affected by restrictive abortion laws to speak onstage, and has been joined by household names like Beyoncé and Michelle Obama.

At the Ellipse, Harris will try to tie Trump’s behavior and his increasingly threatening language to the forces that animated the 2021 riot at the Capitol, arguing that a second Trump term would pose a dire threat to American civic life.

She will highlight a list of threats that includes possible further restrictions on reproductive rights and other plans laid out by Project 2025, the policy blueprint for a conservative presidential administration written by many of Trump’s allies. She is also expected to target some of Trump’s economic proposals, including promised tariffs that could once again fray America’s ties to other economies abroad.

But ultimately, standing on the site of a brewing riot that Trump has since tried to rewrite as a “day of love,” Harris will warn of what he could try to do with even fewer checks on his power.

Last week, the Harris campaign began publishing ads featuring a recording of John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, in which he describes the former president as meeting “the general definition of fascist.” The text in that ad argues that Trump is “unhinged,” “unstable” and “in pursuit of unchecked power.”

According to the adviser who relayed key points of the speech, Harris is expected to lace this argument throughout her speech, while urging Americans to take a step firmly out of the Trump era.

Harris’ advisers are feeling cautiously bullish heading into the week before Election Day. On the call, O’Malley Dillon said the campaign was seeing “increased growth” among supporters in battleground states where early voting is underway.

“We see very good signs for us across the battleground states, in particular in the blue wall,” she said, “and we see that we’re on pace to win a very close election.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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