Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump both took their 2024 campaigns to Pennsylvania Monday night to paint their opponent as a danger to America’s future.
Harris, whose emphasis on “joy” led to a surge in national and battleground polling over the summer, has stalled somewhat in the final stretch of the election. Her campaign rally Monday night in Erie, Pennsylvania, marked the first stop of four across the Midwestern “blue wall” this week. Trump held a campaign rally in Erie in late September.
The bulk of Harris‘s remarks, which followed an introduction from Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), largely stuck to her campaign script, but she did take a page from the former president’s book with a more ominous warning about her opponent.
Halfway through her speech, the vice president cued a highlight reel of Trump’s recent comments suggesting he would use the military and judicial system to go after political opponents.
That clip included a response Trump gave during a Sunday interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo involving what he described as “the enemy within” America.
“The worst people are the enemies from within. The enemy from within. Those people are more dangerous, the enemy from within, than Russia and China,” the former president said during the montage. “We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics, and I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard or, really necessary, by the military.”
After the clip, Harris told the crowd that Trump was unfit to serve.
“You heard his words. You heard the words coming from him. He’s talking about the enemy within Pennsylvania. He’s talking about the enemy within our country, Pennsylvania. He’s talking about that he considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country,” the vice president declared after the clip concluded.
“We know who he would target because he has attacked them before: journalists whose stories he doesn’t like, election officials who refuse to cheat by filling extra votes and finding extra votes for him, judges who insist on following the law instead of bending to his will,” she continued. “This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America and dangerous.”
Trump campaigned on the other side of the state, opting to host a town hall with Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) in Oaks, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb.
“She’s more dangerous than him, but he’s actually smarter than her,” the former president told the crowd of Harris and President Joe Biden.
Still, Trump’s town hall came to an abrupt halt ahead of the scheduled end time after at least two people passed out or required medical attention inside the room that was too hot.
“Would anybody else like to faint?” Trump joked before directing a doctor to assist the ill attendees and pausing the event for multiple playings of the song “Ave Maria.”
At one point, the crowd yelled for air conditioning or to open the doors, but Trump, who has survived at least two assassination attempts in recent weeks, remarked security concerns prevented them from opening.
Trump decided against taking any additional questions and instead spent the rest of the evening listening to songs from his campaign playlist alongside the crowd.
Trump and Noem stayed onstage to dance and lip-sync along to songs by Pavarotti, James Brown, Village People, and others.
Eventually, before leaving the stage, the former president stated, “If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole thing.”
Pennsylvania could very well prove to be the lynchpin in determining the election come November.
Biden carried the Keystone State by some 70,000 votes in 2020 but was trailing Trump in most Pennsylvania polls before dropping out of the race in July.
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Real Clear Politics’s polling average shows Trump holding a less-than-1-point lead on aggregate in the state, while FiveThirtyEight’s average shows Harris up by a similar margin.
Harris is slated to return to Pennsylvania later this week.
