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Kamala Harris will urge Americans to turn the page on Donald Trump as she delivers her closing election argument Tuesday on the spot where her rival rallied supporters before the January 6, 2021 US Capitol attack.
With polls in a dead heat exactly one week before Election Day, the Democratic vice president’s campaign said she chose the symbolic site to push her case that the Republican former president is a threat to American democracy.
But Harris will also deliver an “optimistic and hopeful” message, a senior campaign official said, amid rumblings in the party that she is focusing too much on Trump and not enough on her own policies.
She will address some 20,000 people on the Ellipse, a park outside the White House where Trump delivered a fiery speech in which he ramped up his false claims that he won the 2020 election.
Trump supporters then marched on the Capitol to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, in an assault that left at least five people dead and 140 police officers injured.
Harris’s campaign said in a statement that the former prosecutor would deliver a “major closing argument” and “make the case that it is time to turn the page on Trump and chart a new way forward.”
For his part, Trump, who at 78 is the oldest presidential candidate in US history, will be trying to take the sting out of Harris’s big event by delivering remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
He will then rally in blue-collar Allentown in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most crucial of the seven battleground states that are expected to decide the election.
Trump gave his closing arguments in a mass rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden at the weekend, where some of the other speakers used language widely condemned as racist and sexist.
Fears of chaos
The 2024 White House race has already been one of the most divisive in modern times, with Harris and Trump completely deadlocked as they offer two starkly contrasting visions to a deeply polarised nation.
Fears of a repeat of the chaos from four years ago hang heavy over this year’s election, with Trump indicating that he might again refuse to accept the result if he loses.
Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon, who was imprisoned for refusing to testify to Congress about the January 6 assault, was released Tuesday. Much has changed since the influential right-wing podcaster entered prison on July 1.
Trump has survived two assassination attempts, while Harris has replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic following his shock exit.
The vice president has pledged that America is “not going back” to Trump, while increasingly zeroing in on his harsh rhetoric on migrants and stance on abortion.
In her speech on Tuesday, Harris is expected to echo her recent comments that Trump would focus on an “enemies list” if he returns to the White House, while she would have a “to-do list” to lower costs for Americans.
The first female, Black and Asian American vice president in US history will rely heavily on the visuals of being within sight of the White House, with the campaign describing it as a symbol of presidential power and unity.
But she will also seek to remind Americans of the dark time around the January 6, 2021 riot, when Trump’s refusal to accept the election results brought the country to the brink of civil strife.
A CNN poll on Monday showed only 30 per cent of Americans think Trump would concede defeat this time around, while 73 per cent think Harris would accept a loss.
Harris’s campaign said she would take her message from the Ellipse speech on the road to the battleground states during the last week of the election. Both candidates will keep up a punishing schedule in the final days until November 5, sometimes hitting three or more states in one day.
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