As Kamala Harris ramps up her White House campaign against Donald Trump, top Democrats — and the candidate herself — are seeking to frame the contest in stark terms: prosecutor versus felon.
Former first lady and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, defeated by Trump in the 2016 US presidential race, was among the first to make the comparison between Harris and the Republican candidate.
“I’ve known Kamala Harris a long time,” Clinton posted on X after Democratic President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, his vice president.
“This brilliant prosecutor will make the case against convicted felon Donald Trump,” Clinton said.
“The contrast couldn’t be clearer,” said Harris campaign spokesman James Singer.
Harris, 59, highlighted her law enforcement background and Trump’s myriad legal woes in a speech to campaign staff in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday.
“Before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was the elected attorney general (of California),” she said. “Before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.
“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she 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 went on to cite several of the specific cases against Trump, including one that ended in a jury award of tens of millions of dollars to writer E. Jean Carroll after Trump was found liable for defaming and sexually abusing her.
“I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse,” Harris said.
She also referenced the ill-fated Trump University.
“I took on one of our country’s largest for-profit colleges and put it out of business,” Harris said. Trump, meanwhile, “ran a for-profit college, Trump University, that was forced to pay $25 million to the students it scammed.”
Skillful questioner
While the Carroll and Trump University cases were civil suits, Trump is also the first former US president ever convicted of a crime.
He was convicted in New York in May of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal in the final stages of the 2016 campaign.
Sentencing in that case has been set for September 18, less than two months before the November 5 presidential vote.
The former president also faces federal and state charges for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Biden, but those cases are unlikely to go to trial before the election.
He was also facing charges of mishandling top secret documents, but a federal judge in Florida, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case earlier this month.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges, has appealed the decision by District Judge Aileen Cannon.
Harris also relied heavily on her background as a prosecutor during her 2019 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
At the time her tough-on-crime reputation did not play well with the progressive left of the party and she ended up losing the nomination to Biden.
Besides the prosecutor-versus-felon contrast, Harris’s years of courtroom experience could come in handy if the 78-year-old Trump agrees to a debate.
Harris proved to be a skillful questioner during her time in the Senate, with notable grillings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Trump attorneys general Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr.
Her elevation to the top of the ticket will also allow Democrats to shift the discussion back to Trump’s legal headaches — and away from Biden’s advanced age and mental fitness.
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