Former President Trump on Monday lashed out at Vice President Kamala Harris, criticized her father, falsely claimed she was recruiting undocumented immigrants to vote and claimed Democrats ousted President Biden as part of an illegal “coup.”
His comments came at a manufacturing plant in York, Pennsylvania, in what had been billed as a speech on the economy.
“Kamala has no idea what she’s doing,” Trump said. “Her father is a Marxist professor and I think he taught her well. I wonder if they knew that when they overthrew or staged a coup against Joe Biden.”
The speech — part of a swing through battleground states this week — came on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
In criticizing Harris’s Jamaican-born father, Donald Harris — the first Black person to earn a tenured position in Stanford University’s economics department and a leading scholar of Marxist theory — Trump again resorted to the kind of rally-style personal attacks and conspiratorial claims that have undermined his message during events billed as political speeches.
In recent days, Trump has insulted Harris’ appearance by saying he is “much better looking than her,” falsely claimed that images of her crowds were generated by artificial intelligence and questioned whether she is actually black.
On Monday, Trump, who has been trying to regain national attention amid Harris' rise in the polls, said Harris “wants to be promoted to job killer in chief” and falsely claimed she was recruiting undocumented immigrants to cast ballots.
“They are signing people up as we speak… and they don’t care about the laws,” he said.
Trump, convicted this year of falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying an adult film actor to silence him, added that “the only one who gets prosecuted is someone who talks about the unfair election.”
“But when you steal, rob, kill and do so many other things, when you sell drugs and destroy people's lives, nothing happens to you with Kamala,” he said.
On the economy, Trump promised to ramp up fracking, quickly approve new energy infrastructure and “build American, buy American and hire American.”
Trump is scheduled to appear in Detroit on Tuesday to talk about crime, in Asheboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday to talk about national security, and on Thursday at the U.S.-Mexico border in Cochise County, Arizona, to talk about immigration. On Friday, he is scheduled to speak about his tax-break plan at events in Glendale, Arizona, and Las Vegas.
On Monday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who campaigned for the president at the Trump Hotel & Tower in Chicago, repeated Trump's false claim about an illegal coup.
“Tonight they’re going to formally kick the president off the road,” Johnson said of the first night of the Democratic convention. “Their coup is complete. Their nominee is going to be someone who didn’t get a single vote in the primaries. Is that what you call defending democracy?”
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, in a speech Monday at DiSorb Systems, a Philadelphia company that makes waste management products, criticized the Biden-Harris administration for inflation and high food and gasoline prices.
He said Trump would “stop the reckless spending we’ve seen from the Kamala Harris administration,” cancel “ridiculous regulations” that “make it harder to manufacture and build things,” and “drill, drill, drill” to lower energy costs.
Vance, a former Marine, also continued his attacks on the military service of Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whom he has accused of “stolen valor” and avoiding duty in Iraq. Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard before retiring to run for Congress in 2005, months before his unit received orders to deploy. In 2018, Walz, who has never been in a combat zone, mentioned “weapons of war, which I carried in war” (Harris’s campaign has said he “misspoke”).
“Before the campaign is over, Tim Walz will talk about how he carried an M16 through the jungles of Vietnam,” Vance said Monday.
“The closest Tim Walz came to combat … was when he let rioters burn Minneapolis to the ground” after the police killing of George Floyd, said Vance, who deployed to Iraq for six months in 2005 and did not see combat.
In Chicago, the Democratic National Convention began just a month after Trump received a hero's welcome at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, appearing with a bandage over his right ear after surviving an assassination attempt during a rally in Pennsylvania.
Three days after the Republican convention ended, Biden — who had faced mounting pressure from Democrats to quit after a disastrous debate performance in which he became distracted and struggled to complete sentences — dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris.
About half of American adults have a favorable view of Harris, while 41% have a favorable view of Trump, according to a poll released Monday by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Trump is viewed more favorably by men, and Harris by women.
