Vice President Kamala Harris attacked former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday for claiming at a rally that he would protect American women “whether the women like it or not,” trying to elevate her opponent’s track record with female voters even as the Trump campaign lashed out at the billionaire Mark Cuban, a top Harris surrogate, for insulting the intelligence of women close to the former president.
It was another hairpin turn that took the presidential race from literal trash talk to gender issues in its closing stage, with both candidates trying to inflict political wounds that will take days to heal as Americans cast their votes.
Ms. Harris, speaking from Wisconsin on Thursday morning before leaving for campaign stops in the West, said that Mr. Trump’s comments, made the evening earlier at a rally near Green Bay, constituted a “very offensive” message to all Americans. Within minutes, the Trump campaign fired back: “Why does Kamala Harris take issue with President Trump wanting to protect women, men, and children from migrant crime and foreign adversaries?” Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump had rolled into a Green Bay-area rally sitting in the passenger seat of a garbage truck and tried to tie Ms. Harris to comments made this week by President Biden, who appeared to call the Republican nominee’s supporters “garbage” as he criticized a comic at Madison Square Garden who, days earlier at a Trump rally, had disparaged Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”
But after Mr. Trump told the crowd that his advisers had urged him to stop using a well-worn rally line about his desire to protect women, saying they had called it “inappropriate,” the Harris campaign saw an opportunity to throw the focus of a race that has been divided along gender lines squarely back onto her opponent.
“It actually is very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies,” Ms. Harris said on Thursday, fielding questions from reporters before departing for back-to-back rallies in Arizona and Nevada. “This is just the latest on a series of reveals by the former president of how he thinks about women and their agency.”
As Election Day nears, Ms. Harris has tried to appeal to moderate Republican and independent women, particularly in the suburbs, by talking about her support for reproductive rights and casting Mr. Trump as a threat to them.
Ms. Harris had back-to-back rallies scheduled later Thursday in Phoenix; Reno, Nev.; and Las Vegas, where she is to appear with the singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who is of Puerto Rican descent. Ms. Lopez is among a flood of Hispanic celebrities who signed on to help the Harris campaign in the days after Mr. Trump’s rally in New York.
Mr. Trump, for his part, kicked off the next leg of his campaign with a visit to New Mexico, a notable detour from the top battleground states to one that rejected him by more than 10 percentage points four years ago. He will then travel to Las Vegas and Phoenix, major cities in crucial states.
Mr. Trump’s choice to hold a rally at the airport in Albuquerque raised eyebrows from political observers, given that time is precious and New Mexico has not voted for a Republican since 2004. As he has tried to project confidence and broaden his national appeal, he has made occasional trips to blue states to underscore his support in states that opposed him in his last two elections.
The Trump campaign has also been eager to cut into Ms. Harris’s polling advantage with women. On Thursday, his team seized on comments that Mr. Cuban, who has been campaigning for Ms. Harris, made on “The View” arguing that Mr. Trump was never surrounded by “strong, intelligent women.”
Susie Wiles, effectively one of Mr. Trump’s two co-campaign managers, responded with a rare public statement on social media. Mr. Cuban, she wrote on X, “needs help identifying the strong and intelligent women surrounding Pres. Trump. Well, here we are!”
A Trump adviser, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said that the campaign viewed Mr. Cuban’s remark as a condescending statement in the vein of Mr. Biden’s “garbage” remark, and that Ms. Wiles’s post was part of a coordinated effort to amplify it.
In Ms. Harris’s remarks with reporters, she expanded her criticism of Mr. Trump beyond gender and also warned that he would again try to eliminate the Affordable Care Act if given a second term. As president, he tried and failed to repeal the health care law, which has since become popular with a majority of Americans.
Ms. Harris nodded to remarks this week by Speaker Mike Johnson, an ally of Mr. Trump’s, in which he said Republicans would pursue “massive reform” of the act if the former president won. Mr. Johnson, the she said, would provide “further validation” of Mr. Trump’s efforts.
“Health care for all Americans is on the line in this election,” she said.
On Thursday, Mr. Johnson sought to clarify his comments, which included an apparent agreement with a voter who asked if there would be “no Obamacare” if Mr. Trump won and Republicans controlled Congress. “No Obamacare,” Mr. Johnson replied.
His tone was different in interviews on Thursday.
“They took a clip out of context and said that I said that we were promising to repeal Obamacare,” Mr. Johnson said during an appearance on the Fox Business Network. “That’s just not what I said, it’s actually the opposite of that.”
The former president hit back at Ms. Harris on his social media site.
“Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing. She also said I want to end Social Security. Likewise, never mentioned it, or thought of it.”
As president, Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to overturn the Affordable Care Act. In his current campaign, he has expressed interest in replacing the act and supporting cuts to entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare.
But Ms. Harris spent the bulk of her time on Thursday highlighting Mr. Trump’s remarks about keeping women safe even against their will, an approach he cast as paternal. Women in the crowd at his rally screamed their approval, but Democrats roundly criticized the comments. In her remarks to reporters, Ms. Harris said the former president’s statement was “offensive to everybody, by the way.”
The remarks about protecting women have threatened to further upend Mr. Trumps’s closing message to American voters. The comments evoked his past use of or misogynistic words toward women, a civil court case that found him liable for sexual abuse and the accounts of roughly two dozen women who have said he had abused or attacked them.
His first presidential race was rocked in October 2016, when leaked audio from a past appearance on “Access Hollywood” caught him boasting about grabbing women by the genitals, remarks he later dismissed as “locker room banter.” In civil proceedings, Mr. Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Mr. Trump is appealing the case.
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