Former President Donald Trump spent several minutes at a rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday highlighting Kamala Harris’ comment that she wouldn’t do much differently from President Joe Biden.
Harris’ remarks, which she made on “The View,” have given Trump a new line of attack as he tries to convince voters late in the campaign that it’s the former president who is the real candidate for change.
“She said yesterday that she has no regrets,” Trump said. “She’d do the same thing as this guy — this really sad, pathetic guy.”
Trump went so far as to play a clip of the interview for rally attendees.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said Tuesday on the show when asked by co-host Sunny Hostin if she would have done anything differently than President Joe Biden over the past four years.
Harris later went on to say that, unlike Biden, she’d pick a Republican to serve in her cabinet, adding that she wouldn’t “let pride get in the way of a good idea.”
During an appearance later on Tuesday on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Harris also referenced her earlier comment, making sure to distinguish that she’s “not Joe Biden.”
Voters seeing Harris as too close to Biden — who has a low approval rating — could be a risk for the vice president, even if she’s inextricably tied to their shared administration. A New York Times/Siena College poll this week showed voters by a small margin saying they viewed her as the “change” candidate, not Trump.
The former president’s criticism of the interview at the rally echoed prior remarks he posted on social media.
“Lyin’ Kamala, who is being exposed as a ‘dummy’ every time she does a show, just stated to the degenerates on The View that she would have done nothing different than Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES,” Trump posted.
Trump went on to reference a number of other events under the Biden-Harris administration — including the United States’ exit from Afghanistan and high inflation — and implied Harris should have brought up at least something that had happened in her interview.
Not doing that, he told his audience, made for a “disqualifying answer.”
“She should be disqualified from even running,” he said. “She’s grossly incompetent, she cannot be trusted and she’s totally ill-equipped to do the job of being president of the United States.”
His digs at Harris’ “View” appearance were just one part of a larger host of attacks on his opponent for almost the entire time that he spoke.
Trump also attacked Harris on the administration’s response to Hurricane Helene.
“It was the worst hurricane response since Katrina,” Trump told his audience. Earlier in his speech, he called the government’s response to the flooding and damage in North Carolina the “worst rescue operation in history.”
The former president and his allies have amplified often false claims about the federal government’s disaster response in states affected by damage and flooding — including that FEMA is diverting funding to “illegal immigrants,” an idea that’s been debunked but that Trump referenced multiple times on Wednesday.
Much of the rest of his rally was focused on immigration and Harris’ record on energy production. Trump painted himself as Harris’ opposite on border security and fracking.
Harris said she’d ban fracking while running for the Democratic presidential nomination ahead of the 2020 election but has since reversed her stance. It’s an issue that is particularly relevant in Pennsylvania, where there’s a significant population of energy workers who rely on natural gas for jobs. Trump stuck with Harris’ past position.
“On day one, I will tell Pennsylvania energy workers to frack, frack, frack, and drill, baby, drill,” Trump said. “We’ll have energy independence and energy dominance just like we did four years ago.”
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Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.