Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump clashed for support on Wednesday in the battleground state of North Carolina, holding competing rallies roughly 50 miles apart a day after President Biden appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage.”
In Rocky Mount, Mr. Trump expressed outrage over Mr. Biden’s remark, telling a rally crowd that “you can’t be president if you hate the American people, and there’s a lot of hatred there.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly demonized Democrats, describing them at times as “the enemy within,” “communists,” “these lunatics” and “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” But on Wednesday, he insisted that it was the rhetoric from the Democratic side that was the problem.
“For the past nine years, Kamala and her party have called us racists, bigots, fascists, deplorables, irredeemables, Nazis and they’ve called me Hitler,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “They’ve demeaned us. They’ve demonized us and censored us.”
In Raleigh, Ms. Harris made no mention of Mr. Biden’s comments, instead emphasizing a message of unity as her campaign reaches out to moderate Republicans and independents, particularly women. She was introduced onstage by a former Republican voter who supported Mr. Trump in 2016.
“Here is my pledge to you as your president,” Ms. Harris told the crowd. “I pledge to seek common ground and common sense solutions to the challenges you face. I am not looking to score political points. I am looking to make progress.”
She added: “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”
Earlier in the day, Ms. Harris had tried to separate herself from Mr. Biden. “Let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for,” Ms. Harris told reporters as she prepared to board Air Force Two outside Washington, although she pointed out that Mr. Biden had “clarified his comments.”
In what may be this election’s closest thing to an “October surprise,” a comedian’s racist jokes at a Trump rally on Sunday have been reshuffling the messaging from each campaign and supplying the Trump campaign with a new fund-raising tactic. In a sign of how much the controversy may have broken through to the general public, Google searches on Monday for the name of the comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, surpassed those for Taylor Swift, one of the world’s most famous musicians.
On Sunday, Mr. Hinchcliffe, a comedian and Trump supporter who spoke at the Trump rally in New York, made a joke onstage that disparaged Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” Mr. Biden tried to denounce that racist language in a video call with Hispanic supporters on Tuesday night. But he garbled his words, saying: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The White House and Mr. Biden later argued that he was describing the racist language as “garbage,” not Trump supporters.
Mr. Trump and his allies unleashed a torrent of criticism.
Shortly after Mr. Biden’s remarks went viral on social media, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida came onstage at Mr. Trump’s rally in Allentown, Pa., on Tuesday night and relayed the president’s remarks to the crowd, amid a chorus of boos. The Trump campaign quickly tried to tie Mr. Biden’s comments to Hillary Clinton calling some Trump supporters “deplorables” in 2016 and sent out fund-raising messages referencing the controversy.
Ms. Harris has been pressed to distance herself more broadly from Mr. Biden, an unpopular incumbent who is also her boss, putting her in a difficult position. Her campaign has resisted having them appear together on the trail. Mr. Biden is seen as an undisciplined communicator, and his comments on Tuesday undercut a speech Ms. Harris delivered that same night in which she made unity a major theme.
Her response on Wednesday — quickly pivoting to her campaign trail schedule and her plans for the economy — made it clear that she and her campaign would like to move on from Mr. Biden’s comments. The Trump campaign has made equally clear its intention to keep the remarks in the news cycle.
Polls in North Carolina show a race that is virtually tied, as is true across the seven battleground states and the nation as a whole. Later on Wednesday, Ms. Harris will hold a rally in Pennsylvania. In the evening, both she and Mr. Trump will rally in Wisconsin, reflecting how both campaigns are competing for a narrow slice of undecided voters in the battleground states who could decide the election.
On Wednesday, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate, rejected the notion that Mr. Biden had undermined Ms. Harris’s closing message of unity.
“President Biden was very clear that he was speaking about the rhetoric,” not Trump supporters, Mr. Walz said on CBS News, nodding to Mr. Biden’s attempt to clarify his statement on social media.
Mr. Biden had written on X: “Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage — which is the only word I can think of to describe it. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation.”
Mr. Trump made his first stop on Wednesday in Rocky Mount, an impoverished section of northeastern North Carolina, where Barack Obama energized Black voters on his way to winning the state in 2008, the last Democratic presidential nominee to do so. On the road to the event, Mr. Trump saw a very different scene from the one that greeted him on Tuesday in the Philadelphia suburb of Drexel Hill, where people wearing Trump gear lined the streets, cheering him and waving giant flags bearing his name.
On Wednesday in Rocky Mount, as Mr. Trump’s motorcade drove by, young African American residents stood on their front lawns in front of small houses. Some silently filmed the procession; one man stood on his porch and raised his middle finger.
But the arena, the Rocky Mount Event Center, which seats up to 4,000 people, was filled near to capacity with mostly white Trump fans.
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