CLEVELAND — Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris scoffed at President Trump trying to reduce her to a “female socialist.”
“Joe Biden and I are proud American patriots. And the reality is that the values that we have, I think, are shared by the majority of the American people,” Harris told reporters in Cleveland.
The California senator explained those values were distilled in the Biden-Harris healthcare and tax policies.
“He’s trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. We’re trying to expand it. Our values are about saying we need to lift up working people. Meanwhile, Donald Trump measures the success of the economy based on how rich people are doing and how the stock market is doing,” she said at Burke Lakefront Airport ahead of a one-day swing of Ohio.
Since 2020 Democratic standard-bearer Joe Biden unveiled Harris as his running mate, Trump and his campaign have portrayed her as a “radical” who will unduly influence a hypothetical Biden administration.
“We’re not going to be a socialist nation. We’re not going to have a socialist president, especially a female socialist president. We’re not going to have it. We’re not going to put up with it,” Trump said Friday at a rally in Pensacola, Florida.
While her own unsuccessful White House bid was based on a platform further to the political Left than the top of her ticket, Harris doesn’t identify as a socialist like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. She was, however, an original co-sponsor of Sanders’s signature proposal, Medicare for All.
Harris has also been the subject of racial attacks, both subtle and overt. Trump has repeatedly referred to her as “angry,” “mad,” “nasty,” and a “monster,” as well as saying over the summer that he would “take a look” at a birther conspiracy theory questioning Harris’s eligibility to be vice president.
Embattled Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue followed Trump’s lead this month and purposely mispronounced Harris’s name at a rally with the president in Macon.
“Kamala? Kamala? Kamala-mala-mala? I don’t know, whatever,” Perdue said of his Senate colleague.
Perdue’s Democratic challenger, filmmaker Jon Ossoff, claims his campaign raised $1 million in the 24 hours after the incumbent’s remarks.
