Kamala Harris praised Donald Trump’s former chief of staff for sending a “911 call” to the nation about the former president’s unfitness to serve a second term, attacking her opponent as a “fascist” who nation on a dangerous path.
Harris took part in a CNN town hall Wednesday with undecided voters in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, as the battleground state appears poised to play a potentially decisive role in the presidential race. As he fielded questions from voters on everything from the cost of living to abortion access, Harris repeatedly steered the conversation back to questions about Trump’s fitness for office.
The town hall came a day after the Atlantic published a story detailing former Trump advisers’ accounts of the then-president, expressing a desire for “the kind of generals Hitler had.” The article quoted Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, describing the former president’s consistent pattern of humiliating members of the military. The Trump campaign has denied these stories.
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“I do believe that Donald Trump is unstable, increasingly unstable and unfit to serve,” Harris told CNN host Anderson Cooper at the town hall. “The people who know Donald Trump best, the people who worked with him in the White House … they have explicitly said that he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. They have said he should never serve as president of the United States again.”
Harris predicted that if Trump were elected to a second term, he would not have advisers like Kelly who could help monitor the former president’s behavior.
“[Kelly] is simply sending a 911 call to the American people,” Harris said. “And this time we have to take it very seriously: the people who knew him best and were career people are not going to be there to stop him.”
When Cooper explicitly asked if she considered Trump a fascist, Harris said, “Yes, I do.”
While criticizing Trump’s character and platform, Harris sometimes sidestepped tough policy questions from Cooper and the public. In one of her most substantive answers of the evening, Harris said she believed Democrats should “take a look at the filibuster” to expand access to abortion in the country.
Democrats have pledged to reinstate Roe v Wade if they win the White House and regain full control of Congress, but such a proposal could be blocked by the Senate filibuster, which requires the support of at least 60 of the 100 members of the chamber to advance bills. . The filibuster became a fundamental obstacle to implementing much of Joe Biden’s legislative agenda and could pose more challenges if Harris were to win the presidency.
While Harris’ openness to tweaking the filibuster could prove popular with the Democratic base, some of her other answers may fall short for the progressives she needs on Election Day. Harris reiterated her opposition to a ban on fracking and gave a somewhat muddled response to ending the war in Gaza.
Voter Annalize Kean asked Harris: “What would you do to ensure that another Palestinian does not die from bombs funded by American taxpayer money?”
Harris responded: “Far too many innocent Palestinian civilians have been killed. It’s unconscionable, and we’re at a point now where, with [Yahya Sinwar’s] I believe we have a chance to end this war, bring the hostages home, provide relief to the Palestinian people and work toward a two-state solution.”
While much of the town hall focused on criticism of Trump and policy issues, the discussion occasionally turned to the personal. Harris talked about the role of religion in her life, noting that she prays every day and spoke to her pastor the day Biden withdrew from the presidential race.
Near the end of the town hall, Anderson asked Harris about her experiences grieving her mother, who died of cancer 15 years ago.
“You don’t stop grieving,” Harris said. “It is important to try to remember them as they lived, not as they died.”
With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, Harris and Trump appear to be locked in a neck-and-neck race that will come down to a handful of battleground states, including Pennsylvania. In her closing town hall speech, Harris returned to Trump’s stability, pointing to his recent comments describing Democrats as “the enemy from within” as evidence of his unfitness to serve.
“He’s going to sit there — unstable, unhinged, plotting his revenge, plotting his retaliation, making a list of enemies,” Harris said. “My list will be a list of how I have addressed and continue to address the issues that you are all raising this afternoon and this evening. It becomes a to-do list about how we can impact the American people.”
