SAVANNAH, Ga. — In dueling speeches in battleground states, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump painted competing pictures of the stakes of the 2024 election, with Trump warning of dire economic consequences if Democrats win, and the vice president stoking fears of a second Trump presidency, which she said would mean a national abortion ban and a country where Trump has “no guardrails.”
Harris and her vice-presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have been on a two-day bus tour through Southern Georgia, favoring small gatherings with students and volunteers as well as stops at local businesses. She taped an interview with CNN where she promised to put a Republican in her Cabinet. Her trip culminated with a rally at a packed arena in Savannah where Harris spent most of her speech warning that Trump would be even more dangerous in a second term.
“The stakes in 2024 are even higher because consider that the United States Supreme Court recently just basically told the former president that, going forward, he will be immune no matter what he does in the White House,” she said. “Understand Donald Trump with no guardrails — consider what that means when he has openly vowed that when reelected on day one he would openly be a dictator.”
She also said Trump handpicked Supreme Court justices “with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe versus Wade, and they did.”
In a sign of how worried Trump is about Harris’s appeal among women, he sought to blunt Democratic attacks on his record on reproductive rights by promising that either the government or insurance companies “will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment.”
“Because we want more babies, to put it very nicely,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan, adding that he would allow new parents to “deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes.”
“So we’re pro-family,” Trump added. “The IVF treatments are expensive. It’s very hard for many people to do it and to get it, but I’ve been in favor of IVF right from the beginning.”
In spelling out his proposal Trump offered no details of how it would be implemented, and the prospects of such a policy change remain a long shot. In June, Senate Republicans, including Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance of Ohio, blocked a Democratic bill that would have guaranteed access to in vitro fertilization nationwide.
In many ways, while the candidates are pinballing around the same swing states, they are far apart in tone and timbre. Harris has been running a conventional campaign following a dramatic start to her second bid for the White House. Trump has spent the week steeped in controversy, much of it stoked by him and his campaign surrogates.
On Wednesday, Harris and Walz met with the marching band of a Savannah-area high school, then stopped for barbecue. On Thursday, after taping her first media interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris continued her tour of the Peach State, culminating in an evening rally.
Enmarket Arena in Savannah was nearly filled two hours before Harris was scheduled to speak, with attendees doing the wave and dancing to Beyoncé, Cardi B and Tems.
Trump, for his part, amplified a crude joke about Harris performing a sex act, accused her of staging a coup against President Joe Biden to become the Democratic nominee and faulted her, without evidence, for a security lapse during his attempted assassination. In between, he has starred in an online infomercial where he tried to sell pieces of the “knockout suit” he was wearing when he debated Biden.
His Monday visit to Arlington National Cemetery — and an incident involving his campaign aides and a cemetery employee — drew an unusual rebuke on Thursday from the Army, which said the campaign was told about federal laws regarding political activity at the cemetery and “abruptly pushed aside” the employee.
At Trump’s afternoon event in Potterville, Mich., his aides hoped he could redirect attention to the fact that Harris has offered limited details about her agenda as a president — beyond outlining several populist policies during an address earlier this month in Raleigh, N.C., focused on “lowering costs for American families.”
On a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose to a record high, the former president said he was in Michigan with a simple message for the American autoworker and other workers: “Your long economic nightmare will very soon be over.” Trump blamed Harris for inflation that soared during Biden’s tenure — even though it has more recently been easing back toward normal levels. He also pointed to the rise in housing costs and credit card debt.
“Kamala’s made middle class life unaffordable and unlivable,” Trump said, touting the tax cuts passed during his administration and calling Harris “comrade Kamala.” “I’m going to make America affordable again. In addition to make it great again, we’re going to make it affordable again.”
Trump also made now-familiar attacks on Harris’s record on immigration as vice president and at one point suggested that he didn’t need to make a speech: “All I have to do is say she was the leader of the defund the police movement and then I say, ‘Ladies and gentleman, thank you very much.’”
Harris’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s defund the police attack.
Trump also noted in Michigan that Harris has changed some of her positions since she ran for president in 2019 on key issues such as fracking and universal health care. “She’s the greatest flip-flopper. … She probably goes back to her room and gets sick to her stomach when she says what she has to say. Because she’s a Marxist; she’s a fascist, and she never believed,” he said.
Trump also called Harris incompetent, suggesting that was why she waited until Thursday to do an interview. He and other Harris critics have said her first month as the Democratic standard-bearer has been largely scripted, and that she has availed herself of few opportunities to take serious questions from people not explicitly in her corner.
Some of that criticism may be blunted by the end of this week. Harris and Walz sat down for an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash Thursday afternoon. The interview is scheduled to be broadcast in prime time Thursday, but her campaign released a statement about a Republican in her potential Cabinet even before she started speaking in Savannah.
“I’ve got 68 days to go with this election, so I’m not putting the cart before the horse,” she said, according to excerpts released by her campaign. “But I would [have a Republican in my Cabinet]. I think it’s really important. I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion. I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my Cabinet who was a Republican.”
Her campaign noted that she received endorsements from 238 alumni of the campaigns of former president George W. Bush, and former GOP presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney, an attempt to blunt Trump’s assertions that she was too liberal.
Trump also tried to blunt some of the heat he has taken about his campaign workers’ confrontation with an Army employee at Arlington Cemetery this week.
On Thursday, the U.S. Army defended an Arlington National Cemetery staff member who confronted two Trump campaign workers on Monday, saying they were prohibited from taking photos as part of a political campaign. The Army said in a statement that its employee “acted with professionalism” during the encounter and that she has been “unfairly attacked” by Trump’s supporters and his campaign.
Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita called the woman a “despicable individual,” and campaign spokesman Steven Cheung alleged without evidence that the woman had suffered a “mental health episode.”
In Michigan on Thursday, alluding to the altercation, Trump said while he was at Arlington, the families had asked him to take pictures over the graves of their sons, sisters and brothers. “I said, absolutely, I did. And then I said farewell. I said goodbye,” Trump recounted. “Last night, I read that I was using the site to politic, that I use it to politic. This all comes out of Washington.”
Trump continues to lead in four of the seven battleground states that will likely decide the election, according to a Washington Post composite of polls, but Harris’s standing continues to improve in swing states, including a solidifying position in the Midwest.