Trump launches personal attacks on Biden, Harris
Comments hint at what will likely be the core of his upcoming campaign
WASHINGTON— President Donald Trump unleashed a scorched-earth campaign on Thursday against former vicepresident Joe Biden hours before Biden was to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, predicting “mayhem” if his rival won the general election in November.
“At stake in this election is the survival of our nation, it’s true,” Trump told a small crowd in a Pennsylvania town not far from where Biden was born. “Because we’re dealing with crazy people on the other side. They’ve gone totally stone-cold crazy.”
The president took aim at Sen. Kamala Harris of California, the Democratic nominee for vice-president, seeking to stoke fear of immigrants by offering a brutal description of a case involving an immigrant in the country without legal permission who was included in a jobs program while Harris was the top prosecutor in San Francisco.
“As district attorney of San Francisco, Kamala put a drugdealing illegal alien into a jobs program instead of into prison,” Trump said.
“Four months later, the illegal alien robbed a 29-year-old woman, mowed her down with an SUV, fracturing her skull and ruining her life.”
It was a reference to the case of Alexander Izaguirre, an immigrant convicted of selling cocaine in 2008.
Izaguirre was a participant in Back on Track, an initiative spearheaded by Harris that placed young, first-time drug offenders who pleaded guilty to their crimes into a jobs program rather than jail.
Trump’s attack on Harris was an echo of the Willie Horton episode during the 1988 presidential race between then-vicepresident George H.W. Bush and former governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Bush’s campaign and its allies repeatedly invoked Horton — a
Black prisoner in Massachusetts who, while released on a furlough program, raped a white woman — to suggest Dukakis was soft on crime.
As the president prepares for the Republican National Convention next week, he has begun to reveal the core of his coming campaign: a highly personal assault on Biden and his running mate.
“These people have gone insane and they are radical left,” Trump said, calling Biden “a puppet of the radical-left movement that seeks to destroy the American way of life.”
In Trump’s often blatantly misleading telling, Biden and Harris will destroy the country by taking guns away from Americans, funding late-term abortions, encouraging “deadly ‘sanctuary cities’ ” and allowing low-income housing to “abolish suburbs.”
Seeking to undermine Biden’s appeal in rural, blue-collar parts of Pennsylvania, the president lashed out at him, saying that Biden had “abandoned” his hometown, Scranton, when his family moved when he was a young boy.
Trump said Biden had been at the forefront of a “globalist attack on Pennsylvania voters,” citing the former vice-president’s support of trade deals with Mexico, China, South Korea and “the horrible, ridiculous Paris climate accords.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Trump asserted, “Joe Biden is no friend of Pennsylvania.”