Speaking before thousands of cheering and screaming supporters in must-win Wisconsin, Kamala Harris defined herself and her campaign for President in her first rally after President Joe Biden announced he would not continue his re-election campaign and endorsed his vice president. Harris repeatedly used the term “people first,” a clear contrast to the MAGA Republican nominee’s “America First” rhetoric.
“Just look at how we are running our campaign. So Donald Trump is relying on support from billionaires and big corporations, and he is trading access in exchange for campaign contributions,” Harris said, eliciting boos from the crowd. “A couple of months ago, y’all saw that? A couple months ago at Mar-a-Lago, he literally promised big oil companies – big oil lobbyists – he would do their bidding for $1 billion in campaign donations.”
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The crowd again booed.
“On the other hand, we are running a people-powered campaign,” Harris said to cheers, “and we just had, some breaking news, we just had the best 24 hours,” Harris continued before the crowd again broke out into cheers, “of grassroots fundraising in presidential campaign history. And because we are a people-powered campaign, that is how you know we will be a people first presidency.”
Before pivoting to Donald Trump, Harris shared with her supporters her law enforcement background. She was elected as San Francisco’s District Attorney, which she described as being a “courtroom prosecutor,” and later, elected as California Attorney General.
“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” the Vice President said, “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”
“So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris declared, stopping to take a long, hard stare into the camera.
Harris also told supporters she will protect the right to vote, the right to “live safe from the terror of gun violence.”
“We’ll finally pass red flag laws, universal background checks, and an assault weapons ban,” she declared to cheers.
“And we, who believe in reproductive freedom, will stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans because we trust women to make decisions about their own bodies,” she said to wild cheers, “and not have their government tell them what to do,” she concluded, forced to shout above the roaring crowd.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies’s Foreign Policy in Focus, the “America First” label “began to develop a racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic tone after World War I. The Ku Klux Klan, which surged to some five million members at that time, employed it frequently for its terrorist mobilizations. Like the Klan, nativist groups took up ‘America First’ as they used racist, eugenicist claims to press, successfully, for U.S. government restrictions on immigration. Appealing to an overheated nationalism, William Randolph Hearst used his newspaper empire to campaign, successfully, against U.S. participation in the League of Nations. Soon thereafter, he became a booster of other nationalist fanatics, the rising fascist powers.”
