Why Harris' Big Speech Is a Trump Trap

October 29, 2024

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BY PHILIP ELLIOTT
Senior Correspondent, TIME

As Kamala Harris circled in on a major speech to make her historic campaign's final argument, one venue seemed as obvious as it was potent: the launching pad for the failed insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021—perhaps the most obvious illustration of the real threats posed by sending former President Donald Trump back to the White House.

So on Tuesday evening, just one week before voters render their verdict on a presidential campaign as ubiquitous as it is exhausting, Harris will take the stage on the 52-acre lawn that stands between the White House and the Washington Monument, also known as the Ellipse. While she is not expected to speak solely about democracy or the threat Trump poses to it, that message will be impossible to miss as Harris addresses thousands in person and many more watching across the country from the very spot where Trump urged his legions to push Congress to ignore his electoral failure and keep him in power. It was an ugly, unprecedented moment in American history that ended with nine dead, about 150 law enforcement officials injured, and hundreds more traumatized.

And it's not hard to imagine how Trump might respond to such a blatant provocation. The visual of Harris speaking from the hallowed ground where Presidents have lit national Christmas trees and Menorahs alike should quietly remind voters that Trump's speech was not a normal culmination of any White House term, and that the self-serving thinking behind it could be the norm if he's allowed back into power. The moment will no doubt trigger Trump, or at the very least many of his surrogates, to once again defend his own actions on Jan. 6 and those of his supporters, more than 1,500 of whom have been charged related to that day, including felony cases against 571 individuals, according to the Department of Justice. That's exactly the message Democrats want Trump to be emphasizing in the week before Election Day.

And putting Jan. 6 aside, the setting of the speech, with the White House itself serving as a backdrop, could also inspire voters to imagine what a President from a younger generation might unleash if given the chance. The core of this argument is one that is finding receptive audiences, especially in states where voters might not love Harris but are susceptible to the suggestion that the United States needs to move past the chaos of the Trump years.

The broad outline for the event is based on an account from a senior Harris campaign official, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive planning around a speech that still is not completely closed to tweaks.

It's been apparent for weeks that Harris was increasingly honing her message around the choice voters face between her campaign vision and that of Trump, whose attempt to return to power is as fueled by grievances over Jan. 6 as his desire to avoid any culpability for it and other criminal probes, all or most of which are likely to collapse should he regain presidential powers. On its own, the either-or choice is a compelling argument for those voters who expect Presidents to follow the rules they're charged with enforcing. It's why the Harris campaign has been coming back to the idea that the race is actually between a prosecutor in Harris and a felon in Trump.

And yet this reality remains: roughly 3-in-4 Republicans told pollsters at the third anniversary in January that it's time to move on, including 4-in-5 Trump supporters. In some corners of the GOP, those in jails or prisons for actions related to Jan. 6—including those who attacked law enforcement with weapons—are martyrs to a rigged political system. In fact, Trump has raised money for their legal defense funds and at rallies plays a low-fi recording of inmates singing the National Anthem as a protest against their detentions. In normal times, such an embrace of lawlessness would be disqualifying for the GOP that prides itself on law-and-order hardlines, but this is not the Republican Party of ol'.

As voters see Harris making an intentional return to what some consider the scene of the crime, it could emphasize the criminal scrutiny Trump will still face if he fails to grasp the shield of a second term as President. After Trump has spent more than a year painting the pile of prosecutions against him as politically motivated, it's Harris' turn to make the explicit case that the American voters might be Trump's true sentencing jury.

It's sure to be an effective two-fold message at the end of a campaign that has shown Harris' knack for tapping symbolic settings to convey larger points. (I'm thinking of Friday's dystopian warning on abortion staged in Texas, where a strict abortion ban is in place.) But there's no telling how Trump's apologists might do with this move, especially given how Trump has convinced so, so many people that he is actually a victim of a corrupt justice system.

Yet, in many ways, Trump's own orbit has spent recent weeks walking into the traps laid by Harris and her allies. It was most obvious during their lone debate, when Harris sprang one set piece after another to embarrass her rival. Yet at Trump's rally in New York's Madison Square Garden, Trump's campaign trapped themselves by inviting speakers who leaned into lewd and racist comments. So far, the former President is unwilling to do the bare minimum to demonstrate he rejects those hateful remarks.

As Trump has shown so many times since he launched the first of his three presidential nominations since 2015, it's seldom a good bet to think he can shelve his ego in service of a bigger prize. It's why he did not call off the mob back in 2021, why he did not attend Joe Biden's inauguration in a break of basic decorum days later, and continues to work overtime to undermine faith in democracy itself. It's just a given at this point that Harris's choice of setting for perhaps the biggest speech of her campaign is assuredly going to get under Trump's skin. Harris advisers say it'll be a tactic that will find daily repetition in the swing states for the final week, with the goal of bringing out Trump's worst impulses. If history serves, he won't be able to resist.

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