WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Donald Trump honed his attacks on Vice President Harris, the likely Democratic nominee, in a speech at the Turning Point USA Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach Friday night, calling her “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice president in American history,” blaming her for high numbers of migrant apprehensions at the southern border and calling her a “bum.”
“She was a bum three weeks ago,” Trump said. “She was a bum, a failed vice president.”
The former president urged attendees at the faith-themed event to vote — “Vote early. Vote absentee. Vote on Election Day. I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote,” he said — and promised that in four years, “we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
Trump and other Republicans have long sought to blame Harris for illegal immigration, characterizing her as President Biden’s “border czar.” Though Biden asked Harris to negotiate with three Central American countries to help address the root causes of migration, he never put her in charge of overall border policy.
That and other attacks Friday night continued Trump’s efforts to paint Harris as deeply liberal. Earlier Friday, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump described Harris as a “radical left person” who “destroyed San Francisco.”
But Harris, who served as the top prosecutor in San Francisco and was later elected California attorney general, has a more complicated political story. She won her first race for district attorney by running to the right of the incumbent, her former boss, whom she criticized as too soft on crime.
Trump zeroed in on Harris’s past comments about the “defund the police” movement. In 2020, amid mass racial justice protests, Harris said the movement was “rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities.”
Trump’s campaign attacked Harris on the issue after she joined Biden on the Democratic ticket that year. But a spokesperson for Harris soon disavowed her earlier comments, saying Biden and Harris “do not support defunding the police, and it is a lie to suggest otherwise.” As president, Biden called for increasing police funding to put more police officers on the street.
“America can do better than the bitter, bizarre, and backward looking delusions of criminal Donald Trump,” James Singer, a spokesperson for Harris’s campaign, said in a statement Friday night.
Trump also continued to complain about Biden’s withdrawal from the race, repeating claims that Democrats replacing Biden on the ticket amounts to a “coup.”
Harris has already secured the pledged support of the majority of the delegates she needs to win the Democratic nomination at the party’s convention in Chicago next month. On Friday morning, she got an extra boost from the endorsements of Barack and Michelle Obama, the former president and first lady, the latest nationally prominent Democratic leaders to publicly embrace her candidacy.
Recent polls have shown some positive signs for Harris, and a rush of new money and volunteers has flooded into what was once the Biden-Harris campaign. Her head-to-head numbers against Trump are better than Biden’s were.
Trump spoke extensively about Harris, whom he hammered in a speech at a rally earlier this week, at the Turning Point USA event. But he has also continued to rail against Biden this week, arguing that the Democratic switcheroo was unfair.
“So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race. Now we have to start all over again,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform earlier this week, asking whether the GOP should be “reimbursed for fraud.”
In West Palm Beach, Trump appeared without the bandage he wore on his ear after a gunman attempted to assassinate him at his Butler, Pa., rally. “As I think you can see, I’ve recovered well and in fact just took off — the last bandage off of my ear,” Trump said, making an “ughhh” sound.
Trump, who has a habit of inventing derogatory nicknames for his political opponents, again mispronounced Harris’s first name, claiming, incorrectly, that there are “numerous ways” to say it and saying he doesn’t care if he mispronounces it.
He also criticized Harris for declining to attend Netanyahu’s recent address to Congress — and claimed she “doesn’t like Jewish people,” though her husband Doug Emhoff is Jewish.
He repeated his false claims the 2020 election was rigged and said, “we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024.”
The crowd began to chant: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Offstage, Trump’s campaign was contending with attacks on his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio). Vance has faced intense criticism in recent days for comments he made in 2021, when he said that Democrats without children, whom he characterized as “childless cat ladies who are miserable,” should not control government. (He included Harris in his characterization, even though she has two stepchildren.)
In an interview with Megyn Kelly on Friday, Vance said he has no gripe with women who have struggled to have children and supports efforts to get pregnant through in vitro fertilization, but defended his criticism of those who decide not to have children.
“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs. I’ve got one dog at home, and I love him,” Vance said. But he added: “It is true that we’ve become anti-family. It is true that the left has become anti-child.”
The Harris campaign announced that she would travel to Atlanta on Tuesday for an event, her sixth visit to the swing state of Georgia this year and her first since Biden dropped out of the race and she launched her presidential campaign. She’s in the midst of an all-out push to identify a running mate ahead of the Democratic National Convention.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), a possible Harris running mate, made plans for an event Saturday in his battleground state. Harris’s campaign said Shapiro will “kick off a weekend of action in Pennsylvania to mark 100 days until the election.”
Despite the Turning Point USA summit’s location, just down the road from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, much of the crowd was more focused on religion than on politics. Only a handful of attendees wore red MAGA ball caps; more people wore T-shirts with Bible verses and psalm numbers on them than anything political.
But Charlie Kirk, the Trump ally and Turning Point USA president, reminded attendees why they were there. “Our mission is very simple. We exist to kick wokeism out of the American church.”
The audience booed, briefly, when Kirk mentioned Harris. “It’s easy to boo. It’s harder to register voters,” Kirk said.
Harris “stands against everything that we as Christians believe,” Kirk said.
Rozsa reported from West Palm Beach, Fla. Knowles reported from Clearwater, Minn. Meckler reported from Washington.