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Last night, Vice President Kamala Harris offered her closing arguments at the very place where former President Donald Trump delivered the infamous speech on Jan. 6, 2021, that incited mob violence at the U.S. Capitol and attempted to overturn the results of a free and fair election.
In the final days of their campaigns, both candidates have sent fundamentally different warnings to voters.
For Trump, the state of the country is bleak. The Reaganite city on a hill has given way for the dystopian danger of Batman’s Gotham. In his recent appearances, including a marquee event earlier this week in New York City, he has described a nation filled with unremitting enemies—immigrants coming to commit vicious crimes, radical socialists bent on destroying capitalism, and “woke” activists indoctrinating children with antipatriotic messages and gender dysphoria. Trump has stripped GOP rhetoric of the optimistic tropes that have propped up Republican politics since the 1980s, leaving behind the grim underside of modern conservatism.
Harris also has a warning, but hers centers on Trump himself—he’s dangerous, a divider, and a threat to democracy. “This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates,” she said. “It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.”
“We are not going back,” Harris promised, with a middle-class policy platform that reflects a Democratic Party still rooted in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, in which the problems don’t outweigh the promise of the United States and where smart, rational government has the capacity to move the country toward a better place.