Opinion Kamala Harris’s closing argument: Donald Trump’s own words (E.J. Dionne, WaPo)

Washington Post columnist, Brookings fellow and Georgetown University Professor E.J. Dionne's column on Vice President Kamala Harris's quoting DJT to make her points about Trumpery, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery by the convicted fraudfeasor..  From The Washington Post:

Opinion 

 Kamala Harris’s closing argument: Donald Trump’s own words

If the race turns Harris’s way, it will be because she used Trump’s wild rhetoric against him.

Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns at a get-out-the-vote event on Oct. 19 in Detroit. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

October 20, 2024 at 4:42 p.m. EDT

DETROIT — Vice President Kamala Harris has an indispensable ally as she closes her presidential campaign. She carries messages from him nearly everywhere she goes. His name is Donald Trump.

At a United Auto Workers union hall in Lansing, Mich., on Friday, she showed video of Trump demeaning the labor of autoworkers by describing them as simply taking parts “out of a box” and putting them together — “we could have our child do it,” he claimed — and declaring his hatred of overtime pay.

On Saturday night in Atlanta, the video presentation focused on a shamefully dismissive comment by Trump about Amber Thurman, who died in 2022 after being unable to access medical care because of the state’s abortion restrictions. Trump, Harris said, was “cruel,” and “still refuses to take accountability, to take any accountability, for the pain and suffering he has caused.”

For Republican-leaning voters who can’t stomach Trump but are reluctant to vote Democratic, she has highlighted the threat he poses to freedom and constitutional democracy. Clips of Trump describing his political opponents as “the enemy within” and threatening to use the military against them make the point more dramatically than anything a critic could say.

And if Harris is looking to back up her new ad calling Trump “unhinged, unstable, unchecked,” he provided pornographic evidence on Saturday in Latrobe, Pa., by admiring the size of golfing luminary Arnold Palmer’s penis.

Geoff Garin, a Harris campaign pollster, draws the obvious conclusion. “They don’t want him to be seen and we do,” he told me. “Our job is to put him in front of the public in a way they don’t want him there.”

For Harris, Trump’s indiscipline offers her the chance to seize back the momentum she enjoyed from three surges: her buoyant emergence after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, the success of the Democratic convention and her pummeling of Trump in their single debate. Since then, Trump has managed to shift attention to his own attacks on Harris, his dire and deceptive tirades about immigration, and voter concerns about the cost of living. The result is polling suggesting virtual ties in all seven swing states.

The vice president’s closing moves reflect the opportunities she senses and the challenges she faces. To the extent that there are undecided voters left, her major focus is on female voters — among whom she enjoys large leads and potentially more open minds — and an overlapping group of college-educated moderates and moderate conservatives.

Michigan State Rep. Jennifer Conlin, a Democrat involved in a tough reelection race in a district that marries parts of progressive Ann Arbor with conservative areas in Livingston County, hears potential for Harris when she knocks on doors outside her base. “I have a lot of Republicans who are not Trumpers,” she said in an interview. “I tell them, ‘Come to our side for a little while and we can hope for a more reasonable Republican Party in the future.’” Harris, she says, can pick up voters “who are fed up with divisiveness.”

If you ask both voters and political pros to predict who will carry Michigan, they divide between those who see trouble for Harris in the backlash against the Biden administration’s policy on Gaza in the state’s substantial Arab and Muslim population and among younger voters, and those who see the threat of a Trump presidency as bringing enough Democrats back home.

“We've had a lot of journalists fly in and talk about Gaza and they talked to eight people and think that they understand it,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic candidate for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, said in an interview.

Reflecting how even Democratic optimists expect some hemorrhaging of Arab votes to abstention or third parties in the presidential race, she described discussions about the Middle East in the state as “very difficult, very personal.” But Slotkin added: “I believe there is a silent majority in this state who do not want their kids growing up under Trump. They're not happy with what's going on in the Middle East, but they’re also Michiganders and they’re also practical.”

Similarly, Black political leaders largely dismiss talk of a substantial defection to Trump among Black men — “I almost brought my husband here with me to dispel that,” Detroit City Councilmember Latisha Johnson joked to me at a Harris early-vote rally here on Saturday. But they do worry about turnout.

“In urban areas, you’ll never convince me that there’s going to be a big Trump vote,” said Wayne County Executive Warren Evans. “The issue is the energy level to get these voters to the polls.”

The final key is cutting into Trump’s blue-collar vote by reminding union members of Trump’s attitudes toward labor, as Harris did at the Lansing UAW rally, hitting Trump hard on tax cuts for the wealthy and contrasting the loss of manufacturing jobs under Trump with the revival of manufacturing under Biden.

Momentum shifts in campaigns are often hard to discern when they’re happening, but Sunday’s news shows suggested that Harris’s attacks are starting to land. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) insisted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that despite Trump’s “enemy within” comments, he would not use the military against his political opponents. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested Team Trump is worried about straying Republicans by scolding the defectors on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “What the hell are you doing?” Graham asked indignantly.

Yes, the former president’s champions are getting nervous. That’s why you can count on Harris to use the wonders of video to welcome Trump onto the stage with her for the rest of the campaign.

Opinion by E.J. Dionne

E.J. Dionne Jr. writes a weekly column for The Washington Post. He is a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His latest book, with Miles Rapoport, is “100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting.”follow on X @EJDionne

his hatred of overtime pay.