Kamala Harris Rips Trump as ‘Unstable, Obsessed with Revenge’ at Ellipse

Vice President Kamala Harris painted her opponent, former President Donald Trump, as “unstable” and “obsessed with revenge” at a rally bookmarking the 2024 campaign season.

“This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power,” Harris said as she made her closing argument for the presidency on Tuesday night.

The White House was in silhouette at her back as she stood flanked by American flags against the darkness of night. Harris spoke at the Ellipse — the same site where Trump delivered a pivotal speech on January 6, 2021.

“We know who Donald Trump is,” she told the crowd. “He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election.”

“That’s who Donald Trump is and that’s who is asking you to give him another four years in the Oval Office,” Harris said.

Hers was a carefully curated study in contrasts, political experts said: a Black and Asian woman standing in front of an exuberant and diverse crowd in a place that, just four years earlier, was the backdrop for a violent chapter in modern election history.

“This is bait,” Erin Perrine, a former communications director for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ super PAC said on CNN. The question, she added, is whether or not Trump takes it.

Again and again, Harris drilled down on what she called the behavior of a “petty tyrant,” and suggested turning the page in history.

“As Americans, we rise and fall together. America, for too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust,” she said. “And it can be easy, then, to forget a simple truth: it doesn’t have to be this way.”

A crowd of more than 75,000 people poured onto The Ellipse and spilled out onto the National Mall to hear Harris’ speech.

With exactly one week left before Election Day, Harris and Trump are neck and neck in polling. She has a razor-thin lead over Trump, at 48.1 percent to Trump’s 46.7 percent, according to 538’s aggregation of some of the election season’s most statistically reliable polling.

The two candidates have crisscrossed swing states in the final push to solidify their bases and win over the slivers of voters who say they are still undecided.

In a nod to an issue she has struggled with on the trail that undecided voters have said they view as important, Harris sought to directly take on the issue of immigration.

“Politicians have got to stop treating immigration as an issue to scare up votes in an election, and instead treat it as the serious challenge that it is,” Harris said.
“I will work with Democrats and Republicans to sign into law the border security bill that Donald Trump killed.”

“We must acknowledge we are a nation of immigrants,” she added. “And I will work with Congress to pass immigration reform, including an earned path to citizenship for hardworking immigrants, like farmworkers and our laborers.”

She also signaled subtle appeals to Black men and white women, groups she also needs to gain more traction with to help her win the White House.

According to an NAACP poll conducted between Oct. 11-17 of 1,000 registered Black voters found that roughly one in five younger Black men said they support Trump. Black men typically vote Democrat, and she needs them to cast ballots for her in large numbers.

As she has in recent weeks on the trail in conversations with Black men, she highlighted the broader benefits of her plan to help “first-time home buyers” with their down payment” and “take on the companies that are jacking up rents and build millions of new homes.”

Harris also needs to continue to gain ground with white women and needs to peel statistically relevant support from Trump. For decades, including the 2016 and 2020 elections, white women have historically as a voting bloc have cast ballots for Republican presidential candidates with the exception of Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton.

Throughout the campaign cycle, Harris emerged as a staunch and vocal advocate for consistent reproductive access. According to the Pew Research Center, 64 percent of women express support for legal abortion

On Tuesday, Harris spoke to those concerns saying “I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected supreme court justices took away from the women of America.”