Cartoon by Gabor Papai

A Harris-Trump race would pit ex-prosecutor vs. recently convicted felon

By Ashley Parker

The Washington Post: Kamala D. Harris leaned into her background as a former prosecutor to attack Donald Trump in her first presidential bid in 2020 — a message that attracted little support in the Democratic primary as Harris, short on money, ended her campaign before the first votes were cast.

Now, with the Democratic Party rapidly coalescing behind her following President Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, Vice President Harris is moving quickly to make that case again in the court of public opinion — and this time, against a recently convicted felon.
Addressing staff members at the campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., on Monday, Harris leaned into the prosecutor argument.

“I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse. Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse,” Harris said. “I took on one of our country’s largest for profit colleges and put it out of business. Donald Trump ran a for-profit college, Trump University, that was forced to pay $25 million to the students it scammed.”

In May, a Manhattan jury found former president Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a case related to a hush money payment to an adult-film star. He also faces three outstanding cases — including one state case in Georgia involving election interference and a federal case in Washington involving Trump’s role in the events leading up to the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A third case, on charges of mishandling classified documents, was thrown out last week by a federal judge; a Justice Department special counsel has filed notice of his intent to appeal.

In the weeks following Biden’s stumbling performance during the June 27 presidential debate, which sparked his eventual downfall, former advisers and people close to Harris — a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general — said that embracing the role of prosecutor in chief against Trump would certainly be a key part of her message and appeal.

“This is someone who can clearly and forcefully articulate the case against Trump,” said Jim Margolis, a senior adviser to Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. “That’s the prosecutor in her. And she’s someone who in a debate can move with the conversation and strike back hard — no notecards, just brainpower.”

Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative and longtime Harris supporter, said “there is a clear discernment between Kamala Harris and what she represents and her background and someone who has been convicted of 34 felonies and still has multiple indictments he has to go through.”

Asked about the prospect of a prosecutor-versus-felon matchup, the Trump campaign linked Harris to the Biden presidency, arguing that Harris is responsible for everything from Biden’s border policy to “Bidenomics” to “a weak foreign policy that has led to war and chaos around the world.”

“No one has lied about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and supported his disastrous policies over the past four years more than Cackling Co-Pilot Kamala Harris,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Sunshine wrote in a statement. “While Biden kowtows to California liberals, Kamala Harris actually is one.”

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s newly announced running mate, said in a statement Sunday that “Joe Biden has been the worst President in my lifetime and Kamala Harris has been right there with him every step of the way.”

Harris made the prosecutor pitch during her failed 2020 campaign. Her slogan at the time — “Kamala Harris, for the people” — was what she used to introduce herself in California court. And one of her key ads then — which has since re-emerged and gone viral — explicitly drew a contrast between herself and Trump, with the narrator intoning: “She prosecuted sex predators; he is one. She shut down for-profit colleges that swindled Americans; he was a for-profit college — literally.”
“He’s tearing us apart — she’ll bring us together,” the ad concludes, noting that Harris is “in every possible way the anti-Trump.”

At the time, Harris withdrew from the Democratic primary before the first nominating contest. She was roundly viewed as a poor candidate who churned through staff members — a problem she also had early in her tenure as Biden’s No. 2 — and couldn’t articulate an affirmative case for herself as much as she could a case against Trump.

In the wake of the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a subsequent summer full of Black Lives Matter protests, her tough-on-crime prosecutor background also became something of a liability among her party’s more liberal members.

Now, however, with nearly four years of experience as Biden’s vice president and in a potential matchup with an actual felon, allies hope the message will have more resonance. The Biden campaign’s internal polling has found that attacking Trump as a “convicted felon” is effective, a Harris ally said.

“Her ability to unpack an argument and understand both sides of an argument and then reconstruct it in a way that the average person can understand is an incredible skill set to have,” said Ashley Etienne, who served as communications director to Harris in the vice president’s office. “That was the benefit of her being a former prosecutor and how that translated to the job of vice president.” >>>