US Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday acknowledged the uphill climb to defeat Donald Trump in November but said her new presidential campaign would triumph over her Republican rival’s “baseless lies”.
At the same time that Trump was preparing to address a bitcoin conference in Tennessee, Harris was speaking at a fundraising event in Massachusetts that featured celebrity guests such as singer-songwriter James Taylor and cellist Yoyo Ma.
“We’re behind in this race, but this is a people-powered campaign,” he told the crowd at the event. His campaign said it would raise $1.4 million.
“You may have noticed that Donald Trump has been telling some lies about my record. And some of the things he and his cronies are saying are just bizarre,” he said, the latest joke adopted by Democrats to describe Republican attacks.
The latest of these were Trump’s remarks at a religious conference on Friday night, in which he accused Harris of being an anti-Semite for planning to allow the killing of newborn babies.
he said of the vice president, whose husband is Jewish. “She doesn’t like Jewish people. She doesn’t like Israel. That’s the truth.”
In perhaps his most outrageous statement of the night, he claimed that Harris wanted to enshrine in federal law “the right to take a baby out of the womb at the eighth, ninth month and even after birth — the right to kill a baby after birth.”
Trump, who at 78 is now the oldest major-party nominee in history, is struggling to hold his own against a candidate two decades younger than him, as he faces 81-year-old Joe Biden, who is physically frail.
Seeking to become the first female president in U.S. history, Harris is tasked with building a fast-paced campaign against an opponent who has been in almost permanent re-election mode since becoming president in 2016.
Her late bid for the White House has taken an early lead. Polls previously showed Biden trailing Trump, but Harris is now in a much closer race.
He has received endorsements from Democratic heavyweights, including Biden himself and, more recently, Barack and Michelle Obama.
Toriana Parrish, 34, was among the crowd welcoming Harris upon her arrival at Westfield Airport in Massachusetts on Saturday afternoon.
“I wanted to show that there’s power in numbers. I wanted to show my support,” she said.
“We are in support of him and we want him to make this country what it needs to be.”
Harris was introduced at Pittsfield’s Colonial Theatre by Taylor, who said: “Let us honor that woman and that moment, and let our strong support put wind in her sails. Our hopes are with her and she stands for all of us.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
