by Alexis Simendinger & Kristina Karisch
Who has a better tax plan for the middle-class, a cure for school shootings, experience to end world conflicts?
Vice President Harris warned Wednesday during a campaign event in New Hampshire that fiscal ideas promoted by former President Trump would add more than $5 trillion to the national debt.
The Boston Globe: “The campaign has determined that New Hampshire is no longer a battleground state,” a former Trump campaign vice chair in Massachusetts said this week.
The former president, appearing in Pennsylvania hours later during a town hall hosted by Fox News, criticized Harris as “dangerous” because she has reversed her 2019 opposition to extracting oil and gas using fracking, a technique important to Pennsylvania’s economy but criticized by environmentalists.
“She wants no fracking. And she said it 100 times, ‘There will be no fracking,’” Trump said, repeating critiques he deploys during campaign rallies.
Look, this is, this is a woman who is dangerous. I don’t think too smart, but let’s see,” he added.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R), who campaigned for Republican Nikki Haley during the GOP presidential primary and backs Trump in the general election, criticized the vice president, saying Harris’s message to voters is, “‘Hey, I’m not Joe Biden.’”
“That’s literally all Kamala Harris has right now. That’s not enough to cross the finish line in these swing states come Nov. 5,” Sununu said during a Bloomberg TV and radio interview Wednesday.
Harris will be in Pittsburgh today and will hover in the state as she prepares for Tuesday’s much anticipated debate with Trump, moderated by ABC News. The two will meet for the first time in Philadelphia for the event. The former president, who prefers improvisation to debate rehearsals, today will address a luncheon audience of executives and financial experts at the Economic Club of New York. The audience wants to hear in greater detail about the tax, spending and tariff proposals Trump has in mind, if elected.
Ahead of next week’s faceoff, the two candidates are wielding attack ads, deploying social media, unveiling competing policy proposals and plotting strategies to try to inspire voter turnout.
Harris went off script in New Hampshire, where her planned topic was a proposed capital gains tax rate and business incentives for entrepreneurs (see reporting, below), to respond to a school shooting Wednesday. A mass shooting near Athens, Ga., left two students and two teachers dead and a 14-year-old male in custody and charged with murder as an adult. Law enforcement had previously interviewed the suspect a year ago after receiving reports of threatening posts, but did not have enough evidence to take further action (WJBF and The Washington Post).
“It does not have to be this way,” the vice president said.
President Biden, in a written statement, repeated his call to Congress to approve pending “common-sense gun safety legislation.”
Trump, reacting to the Georgia news, promised to “heal” the world.
“It’s a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons and we’re going to make it better,” he said. “We’re going to heal our world. We’re going to get rid of all these wars that are starting all over the place because of incompetence.”
The New York Times: Trump questioned the fairness of his upcoming debate with Harris. “I’m going to let her talk,” he added.