Another historic pivot point seems to be beckoning.
Harris and Trump to debate next month |
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Ex-President Donald Trump's debate against Joe Biden went so well that he knocked his 2024 opponent Joe Biden out of the race. Now he's sizing up the President's replacement – Vice President and new Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, after reversing himself and agreeing to go head-to-head with her on September 10 on ABC. Another historic pivot point seems to be beckoning. At a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort Thursday, Trump compared Harris unfavorably with Biden, whom he'd long argued lacked the mental acuity to serve. "She's actually, not as smart as he is. I don't think he's very smart either, by the way. I'm not a big fan of his brain," Trump said. The clash also looms as an extreme test for Harris. The vice president has a mixed record in debates – she performed strongly in such events early in her failed 2020 presidential campaign. But at others she struggled, and her most unflattering moments in office have come when she's struggled to explain her own positions or seemed unprepared for tough questions in major interviews. As she grows in confidence as the Democratic nominee, Harris is a more accomplished politician than she was four years ago, and supporters are keen to see her leverage her skills as a former prosecutor to skewer the four-times indicted former president. Harris jabbed Trump over his change of heart over the ABC debate and said she was happy to have a conversation about a second, later encounter. "I'm glad that he's finally agreed to a debate on September 10. I'm looking forward to it, and I hope he shows up," she told reporters before boarding Air Force Two in Detroit. |
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Almost the first thing that Trump did as president in 2017 was to ignite a ridiculous controversy over whether he or former President Barack Obama got the biggest crowd at their inauguration. He's still obsessing over crowd sizes – fuming no doubt about the massive turnout at rallies this week in the Midwest as Harris paraded her new running mate Tim Walz. At his news conference, Trump compared his crowd on January 6, 2021 – right before his mob ransacked the US Capitol – to the throng at Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream speech" during the March on Washington in 1963. He boasted: "The biggest crowd I've ever spoken to and you've seen when I was at the [National] Mall, I was at the Washington Monument. I was at the whole thing – I had crowds. I don't know who's ever had a bigger crowd than I have … The biggest crowd I've ever spoken before was that day, and I'll tell you, it's very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture of a small number of people relatively going to the Capitol, but you never seen the picture of the crowd. The biggest crowd I've ever spoken. I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me." That includes the civil rights hero, according to Trump. "And you look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd and my crowd. We actually had more people. They said I had 25,000, and he had a million people and I'm okay with it because I liked Dr. Martin Luther King," he added. You won't be surprised to learn that contemporary pictures of both events do nothing to bear out Trump's claims. And as the NAACP pointed out on X: "MLK's speech was about democracy. Trump's was about tearing it down." |
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Thanks for reading. On Friday, Nagasaki holds commemorations on the 79th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb. On Saturday, Hawaii holds a state primary. The Edinburgh International Book Festival kicks off in Scotland. On Sunday, Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice President Harris, leads the US presidential delegation at the closing ceremony for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris. |
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