She has another week, and so does Trump. But comparing her excellent Ellipse speech to Trump’s Madison Square Garden satyricon is absurd.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at the Ellipse in Washington, DC.(Kent Nishimura / Getty Images)
Donald Trump delivered his closing argument Sunday night after a posse of racists and reprobates insulted Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, Taylor Swift (implicitly), women, and Vice President Kamala Harris herself at New York’s Madison Square Garden. His own speech rehashed his promise to crack down on “enemies of the people,” pledged to replace taxes with tariffs, described the United States as an occupied country, and, again, insulted Harris’s intelligence. It was incoherent. Today, he called the event a “lovefest.” Nothing more is ever expected of him.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday night at Politico’s West Wing Playbook, the stakes were high for Harris’s so-called closing argument, which she delivered at the Ellipse behind the White House where Trump summoned his insurrectionists to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The headline: “Kamala tries to stick the landing.”
“Stick the landing” comes from gymnastics talk: It refers to when a gymnast, it could be a man or a woman, wraps up an extremely acrobatic set with a perfect, stable, standing-on-two-feet ending. Male or, most famously, female, they must be perfect throughout their contortions, and land impressively on two solid feet. That’s what’s expected of Kamala Harris: to “stick the landing,” as Trump shambled through his “closing.”
It was hard not to think of the comparison between the candidates Michelle Obama made in her speech in Kalamazoo Saturday night.
“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn,” she said. “For Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”
Indeed. But Harris came out and killed it nonetheless. In front of an estimated crowd of 75,000, she helped wipe away the memory of the January 6 insurrection. It was a peaceful, loving crowd—for real, not what Trump described—who listened to Harris reassure them that we know what we have to do next Tuesday.
“We know who Donald Trump is,” she said. “He’s the person who stood at this very spot and set an armed mob to the capitol to overthrow the will of the people.” As she’s said before, she’ll come to office with a to-do list, while Trump would come with “an enemies list…to set free the violent extremists who assaulted law enforcement on January 6.
“Americans died as a result of that attack. One hundred and forty law enforcement officers were injured. And while Donald Trump sat in the White House watching as the violence unfolded on television, he was told by staff that the mob wanted to kill his own vice president. Donald Trump responded with two words: ‘So what?’”
Harris ran through her policy proposals, from housing to elder care to childcare. (Her promise to allow Medicare “to cover the cost of home care” got one of her loudest cheers.)
She also reiterated her pitch to Republicans and independents: “Our democracy doesn’t require us to agree on everything. That’s not the American way. Just the opposite. We don’t shy away from robust debate. We like a good debate. And the fact that someone disagrees with us, does not make them ‘the enemy from within.’
“They are family. Neighbors. Classmates. Coworkers. They are fellow Americans. And as Americans, we rise and fall together. America, for too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos, and mutual distrust. And it can be easy to forget a simple truth: It doesn’t have to be this way.”
We now confront a second Trump presidency.
There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.
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Onwards,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
I watched MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recoil a little bit and compare that to President Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon back in 1974, which still roils the left. I didn’t hear it that way, but I took the warning.
But it was hard to see it as mainly a pitch to right-leaning voters with lines like this: “Those who came before us—the patriots at Normandy and Selma. Seneca Falls and Stonewall…they did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms…[and] submit to the will of another petty tyrant.” (Although I believe some former Republicans are coming to see those battles our way.)
Harris is still introducing herself to some voters, and took the time.
“I grew up as a child of the civil rights movement, where crowds of people of all races, walks of life, came together to fight for freedom of opportunity. Family by blood and family by love instilled in me the values of compassion and faith. I’ve lived the promise of America. I see the promise of America in all of you. I see it in the young people who are voting for the first time.”
I don’t think, with a full week left, that either one of these will remain the “closing” argument, but stack them up against each other right now and we know who should be president. We will have more closing arguments, big and small. But Harris bested Trump in this contest.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.