Needling her as “Comrade Kamaala” and describing his Democratic Party rival as an inveterate second-generation Marxist, Donald Trump on Friday campaigned in Pennsylvania, a key milestone on the road to the White House, where his lead in polls appears to be evaporating.
While Kamala Harris has moved to the centre and, at least publicly, renounced her radical past, Trump played back on giant TV screens at his rally in Johnstown clips of Harris’ old statements aimed at her party’s left.
During her failed run for the presidential nomination in 2019, Harris had vowed to ban fracking – a way of drilling for natural gas in shale formations underground – and Trump kept hammering at it because that is an important issue for Pennsylvania.
In an interview on Thursday, Harris acknowledged she had changed her position and would not ban fracking, while also declaring repeatedly, “My values have not changed”.
With a phalanx of labourers dressed in their work clothes topped by hardhats standing behind him, he declared that from Day One, his policy would be “Drill baby, drill” for fossil fuels including gas.
At his rally in an indoor arena in Johnstown, her long ago pronouncements – that she has since walked back – on ending private health insurance, decriminalising illegal border crossing, cutting funding for police, and compulsorily buying back guns from owners rolled on screens, and Trump turned them into a handy scare tactic.
“She is a Marxist, her father is a Marxist”, Trump said, referring to her father Donald Harris, the Jamaica-born Stanford University emeritus professor of economics, from whom she is estranged.
RealClear Politics aggregation of Pennsylvania polls shows that Trump’s 3 per cent lead over Harris in July when Biden withdrew has disappeared with the Democrat now having a narrow 0.8 per cent lead.
In the US system where the state-wise composition of the electoral college can override the national popular votes, Pennsylvania is one of the battleground states that go either way and help determine the winner.
Nationally Reuters/Ipsos and Morning Consult polls taken since last week give her a 4 per cent lead and the overall RealClear Politics aggregation puts her ahead by 1.8 per cent.
One of the clips projected was of her agreeing with an interviewer that she would agree to change government dietary guidelines to reduce the consumption of red meat, a category that includes beef.
He criticised her for this at the rally, as he has at previous campaign stops.
It could be interpreted as a subtle dig at her Indian heritage as he raised it days after having claimed that Harris has all along been an Indian and only recently proclaimed her African American background.
(In reality, her public acknowledgment of her Indian heritage came long after projecting her political persona as Black.)
At the rally he gave a shout-out to Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu elected to Congress, for leaving the Democratic Party to support him.
“I feel very happy to get” her endorsement, he said
While Trump chastised Harris’ flip-flops, he too showed at the rally what would be a dissent from the core of conservative orthodoxy by reaffirming his backing for insurance or government-funded in vitro fertilisation.
A Bench of conservative judges in Alabama ruled that eggs fertilised through medical procedures are considered “unborn children” creating a legal quagmire that the Republican leaders are trying to get out of.
“We need more babies to be born in America”, said the father of five from three marriages.
Trump’s rallies are staged as political theater where he keeps his faithful amused and aroused jumping back and forth disjointedly between topics, leavening them with humor, mostly at the expense of his adversaries.
He called this speaking style, “weaving”, while he acknowledged some others dub it “rambling”.
“I’ll talk about nine things and they all come back brilliantly together”, he said.
Trump railed against the news media calling it biased and a man jumped into the media enclosure.
The intruder was hit by police with a jolt of electricity from a Taser device to subdue him and as he was led away to the crowd’s cheers, the Republican candidate asked, “Is there anywhere that’s more fun to be than a Trump rally”?
He joked that Harris would ask to join his Make America Great Again Movement and wear its signature red cap because she was backpedaling her past pronouncements.
He nicknamed Harris’ running mate Tim Walz as “Tampon Tim” for the state he governs, Minnesota, putting female hygiene products in boys’ school bathrooms in the name of equality for transgender students.
Plunging into divisive cultural issues, he said that he would ban men from participating as women in sports, stop sex change therapy for children, and reinforce parents’ rights.
He added he would criminalise burning the national flag and enforce laws against damaging national monuments.
On foreign policy, he talked of his interactions with Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and his tough bargaining.
Harris would not be able to stand up to the likes of Xi and Putin, he asserted.
He blamed her for the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle in which 13 US military personnel were killed and defended his visit to their graves at the military cemetery in Washington where his entourage had a run-in with a Defence employee who said she was enforcing rules against politicising the place.
He said that he only agreed to the request from family members for pictures at the gravesite.
(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed at @arulouis)
