The Democratic party baton has not officially passed from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, but already, the vice president is facing Republican attacks befitting a presidential front-runner.
Only moments after Biden announced he would not be seeking reelection on Sunday, upending the 2024 race, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and his allies unleashed an offensive against Harris, seeking to tie her to Biden’s record on immigration and criticizing her views as too liberal.
“Kamala was in on it. She covered up Joe’s obvious mental decline,” said a narrator in an ad released Sunday by a Trump-supporting super PAC. “Kamala knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead.”
Trump, the GOP’s presidential nominee, also previewed coming attacks against Harris at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday.
“I call her Laffin’ Kamala. You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh… She’s nuts,” Trump said in his first rally since becoming his party’s standard-bearer.
Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, called Harris “even more liberal and less competent than” Biden in a post on Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform.
Republicans on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, said Biden can’t carry out his duties and called on him to resign from office immediately, a step that, ironically, would make Harris president.
They also sought to turn the tables on the Democrats by arguing that by pushing Biden to step aside, Democratic lawmakers rejected the will of the voters who cast their ballots to make Biden the nominee earlier this year.
“Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a statement Sunday.
“The party’s prospects are no better now with Vice President Kamala Harris, who co-owns the disastrous policy failures of the Biden Administration,” he added.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), meanwhile, pointed to Harris’ statements in the past defending Biden from questions surrounding his age as a reason not to trust her candidacy.
“For four years, those closest to Joe Biden, including Kamala Harris, knew he was not fit to be president and lied to the American people in an effort to hold onto their power,” Scott said in a statement. “It was painfully clear that Biden wasn’t competent for office going way back to 2021.”
What is clear is that Biden’s decision to drop out has scrambled the 2024 race, which is why Republicans were pushing for Biden to stay in before he made his announcement on Sunday. Trump, 78, will now be the oldest candidate in the contest with a laundry list of baggage, including his felony conviction in New York.
Dave Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, noted the age difference between Harris and Trump on Sunday: