Harris and Trump go toe-to-toe in a frenzied final campaign weekend

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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump enter the final weekend of the tensest US presidential campaign in modern times with a wave of swing-state rallies that will test their staying power – and their ability to sway the country’s last undecided voters. convince.

Harris, who is running to become the country’s first female president, will use rallies in Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan to deliver her message that Trump is a threat to American democracy.

Trump – seeking a sensational return to the White House after losing in 2020 and subsequently becoming the first presidential candidate to be convicted of crimes – is promising a radical right-wing government makeover and aggressive trade wars to boost his “America first” policy. “

The 78-year-old, who gathered late Friday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just miles from Harris’ event there, will almost cross paths with her again as Trump makes whistle stops in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Their hectic schedule continues into Monday, culminating in late-night rallies — in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Trump and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for Harris.

Election day is Tuesday, but Americans have been voting early for weeks, with more than 70 million votes already cast – including a record four million in Georgia, where Democrats are trying to do everything they can to keep the state in their column.

Opinion polls continue to show a tie, especially in the seven battleground states that will likely determine the outcome in the US electoral college system, leaving the Republican businessman and his 60-year-old Democratic rival to fight hard to steal even a glimmer of support from voters. each other’s camps.

Harris, currently President Joe Biden’s vice president, is doing that by appealing to centrist voters and propelling her base to the polls with a robust ground game and a get-out-the-vote effort.

And by portraying Trump as a toxic authoritarian, she is also encouraging voters to “finally turn the page” on the former president.

“He is an increasingly unstable person, obsessed with revenge, consumed with resentment – ​​and the man is bent on unchecked power,” she told supporters in Little Chute, Wisconsin.

Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on his already extreme rhetoric in hopes of galvanizing his loyal base to come out in large numbers.

“Kamala’s final message to America is that she hates you,” Trump raged Friday evening in Warren, Michigan, where he blasted the economy under Biden and Harris as a disaster — which economists say is clearly not the case — and warned that “an economic depression in the style of 1929 would follow if Harris were elected.

Citing her hawkish foreign policy positions, Trump had previously evoked the image of former Republican representative Harris supporter Liz Cheney being shot.

“She is a radical war hawk. Let’s put her there with a gun and nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about, you know, having the guns pointed at her face,” Trump said.

Despite the rhetoric, Trump waxed nostalgic Friday about how his experience campaigning over the past nine years has been “the thrill of a lifetime.”

“And now we want to turn that tension into ‘let’s do business,’ right?”

Harris, the nation’s first Black and first Asian American vice president, has meanwhile sought to leverage the power of celebrities like Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen in the final days of the campaign.

Jennifer Lopez, a pop icon of Puerto Rican descent, joined Harris onstage Thursday amid a firestorm sparked by a Trump warm-up speaker who labeled the U.S. territory a “floating island of trash.”

Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B appeared with the candidate Friday night and asked the Milwaukee crowd, “Are we ready to make history?”

With the election just days away — and Trump refusing to say whether he would accept its results if he loses — businesses in the capital Washington have begun boarding up storefronts as city authorities warn of a “fluid, unpredictable security environment” in the United States. days after the polls close.

Trump is already accusing fraud and deceit in swing states like Pennsylvania, laying the groundwork for what many fear will bring more unrest following the violence that erupted at the U.S. Capitol in the aftermath of the 2020 election.