PITTSFIELD, MA — Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking at her first fundraiser since becoming the Democratic nominee for the White House, accused Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump of trying to roll back American freedoms.
Harris traveled to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on Saturday, where her campaign announced it expected to raise more than $1.4 million from an audience of several hundred at the Colonial Theater — more than $1 million more than the original goal set for the event before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
She told excited supporters that she entered the race as an “underdog” but expressed confidence that her fierce campaign could beat Trump.
“I’m going to fight to move our country forward,” Harris said. “Donald Trump is trying to take our country backwards.”
Harris also criticized Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, for making unusual attacks on her and other Democrats. The vice president appeared to allude to a 2021 interview with Vance in which he called several prominent Democrats without biological children, including Harris, “childless cat ladies” with “no direct stake” in the country.
“You have to realize that Donald Trump is lying about my record and what he and his running mate are saying, and it’s just weird,” Harris said. “That’s the box you put it in, right?”
Harris’s labeling of the Republican field as “bizarre” appears to be part of a coordinated effort by her campaign to highlight some of Trump and Vance’s rhetoric as questionable. Earlier this week, on the social media site X, the Harris campaign called some of Vance’s positions on women’s reproductive rights “bizarre and creepy.” Meanwhile, Trump referenced the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “The Silence of the Lambs” in a campaign speech.
“These people are just weird,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat who is Harris’s vice presidential pick, said in an MSNBC interview earlier this week. “They’re running for the He-man misogyny club or something.”
Supporters of the fundraiser included musician James Taylor and prominent state Democratic figures including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, former Gov. Deval Patrick and Rep. Rich Neal.
In the 48 hours after Biden dropped out of the race, Harris raised more than $100 million in donations, the most in presidential campaign history, and aides say she has been a steady fundraiser.
“This is a people-led campaign,” Harris said. “And we have momentum.”
Harris, a former California prosecutor, also scoffed at Trump’s legal troubles, citing his recent conviction in New York on 34 counts of falsifying corporate records, a jury finding the former president liable for the 1996 sexual abuse of advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, and a $25 million settlement paid to attendees of Trump University, a now-defunct real estate seminar.
“I’ve dealt with people like that my entire career,” Harris said. “So in this campaign, and I’m serious about that, I will proudly stand my record against his any day.”
Harris began her speech by praising Biden, whose campaign has been in a slump since his dismal performance in the June 27 debate with Trump, for dropping out of the reelection race and endorsing Harris last weekend.
She called Biden’s accomplishments over the past three and a half years “unparalleled in modern history.”
Trump disparaged Harris as a “radical left-wing lunatic” who wants to defund the police during his keynote speech at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville on Saturday.
He said she was worse than Biden but probably his second-favorite candidate to run against Biden.
Trump told Bitcoin supporters that he would be more accepting of the cryptocurrency than the Biden-Harris administration, and vowed to “replace the Biden-Harris recession with a boom.”
The vice president told supporters at a fundraiser in Massachusetts that her economic policies would stand in stark contrast to Trump’s, who she argued was focused on lowering taxes on wealthy Americans and improving corporate bottom lines.
“Growing the middle class is going to be a defining goal of my presidency,” Harris said. “This campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump,” she added. “Our campaign has always been about two very different visions for our country.”
Separately, the vice president’s office announced that Harris would travel to Atlanta on Tuesday to attend a campaign event and to Houston on Thursday to attend a memorial service for 74-year-old longtime Democratic House member Sheila Jackson Lee, who died July 20.
Jackson Lee, who suffered from pancreatic cancer, led federal efforts to protect women from domestic violence and to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
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Associated Press writer Ally Swenson in New York contributed to this report.
