Roving Periscope: “Extremely serious consequences if you elect Trump,” Harris warns US voters
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: The Democratic Party’s new candidate, Kamala Harris, 59, has warned the American voters against electing her Republican rival Donald Trump as it could lead to “extremely serious consequences.”
In her Thursday night acceptance speech, she took forward President Joe Biden’s earlier attempt, wherein he framed voters’ choice in November to dark and ominous terms, to paint Trump as a ‘menace’ to American democracy and questioned whether the US could survive if he (Trump) won.
Putting her own spin on the Democrats’ central strategy—that a Trump win could pose an existential threat to America’s foundational institutions and traditions, Harris expanded her party’s definition of what is at stake in the November polls: preserving personal freedoms.
This renewed emphasis unfolded this week at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago, where attendees defined what they understood from the word ‘freedom’ and Beyoncé’s anthem “Freedom” boomed through the loudspeakers.
The DNC dedicated a day’s theme to “fighting for our freedoms,” with special guest Oprah Winfrey suggesting those working to preserve reproductive rights are “the new freedom fighters.”
Harris drove the point home over and over as she summarised her promises to American voters.
“The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities, and places of worship,” Harris said Thursday. “The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. The freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”
Experts say the Democrats’ more positive, personal appeal signals that the party is trying to boost morale and reclaim terms such as freedom and liberty — ideas that Republicans have spent years branding as their own.
Outgoing President Joe Biden had focused on the threat-to-democracy narrative. After all, it was his presidency that was jeopardized by Trump’s alleged lies about the 2020 election that led to the violent assault on the US Capitol in an attempt to halt the transfer of power in January 2021.
Biden, 82, who dropped out of the presidential race last month after urgent pleas from within his party, seemed to accept his duty as a messenger of the campaign’s new theme. In his Monday DNC speech, he said this election’s results will determine “whether democracy and freedom will prevail.”
But Trump’s campaigners are not sitting idle at this Democrats’ onslaught.
“It’s always good to see Americans express a love of our nation,” Trump senior adviser Brian Hughes said. “But a party that has opened our borders to drugs and crime, diminished our standing as a force for global peace, and made it difficult for fellow Americans to afford the basics of life seems the exact opposite of patriotic.”
Shortly after Harris’ acceptance speech, Trump sought to poke holes in the idea that she could provide positive changes for the country. He argued if she wanted change, she could have achieved it already in her current role as vice president.
“Why didn’t she do the things that she is complaining about?” he told Fox News. “She could have done it three-and-a-half years ago. She could do it tonight by leaving the auditorium and going to Washington, D.C., and closing the border.”
Several speakers, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, pointed to the need to guard American and distinctly democratic institutions. They also issued stark reminders of the January 6, 2021, riot in which Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, attacked police officers, and sought to halt the certification of the 2020 election.
