President Donald Trump mocked Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday as part of a “grossly incompetent” and “stupid” administration that he said she embraces without challenging anything about it.
Trump spoke at Riverfront Sports in his first campaign stop this year in Scranton, where President Joe Biden was born.
“I believe she’s worse than him,” Trump said. “Pennsylvania cannot let this woman become the president of the United States.”
With victory in Pennsylvania considered a key to winning the presidency, Trump kicked off his 82-minute speech by whipping up the crowd with claims that Democrats will try to cheat in the Nov. 5 election.
He pointed to polls in battleground states that show him leading Harris.
“You know, if they only cheat a lot, we’re in great shape. But if they cheat in record setting numbers, which they're capable of doing, I can't promise, but … they are cheaters,” he said.
He urged more mail-in voting.
“We want a landslide that’s too big to rig,” he said.
Polls: Pa. race virtually tied
Trump arrived in Scranton for his 4th visit to the city and 5th to Lackawanna County since 2016. He lost the heavily Democratic county by about 3,500 votes to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and by about 9,600 to President Joe Biden in 2020.
Since Trump lost to Biden, Democrats’ voter registration advantage in the county has shrunk to its lowest level since the 1952 presidential election.
Polls show the Pennsylvania race virtually tied, according to the poll-aggregating website, RealClearPolitics.com.
Fracking, energy major themes
The city and county have no natural gas wells or fracking, but surrounding counties and the rest of the state do and Trump made sure to bring that up.
He said he would cut energy prices in half in his first year and insisted Harris would ban fracking.
“On day one, I will tell Pennsylvania energy workers to frack, frack, frack and drill, drill, drill, drill, baby, drill. We're going to frack, frack, frack,” he said.
Harris once opposed fracking, and Trump played the video of her saying that, but she has repeatedly said she changed her mind three years ago.
At length, Trump contrasted his view of energy issues with Harris’ positions.
He promised to terminate “the green new scam,” his derisive term for Democrats’ Green New Deal and its emphasis on alternative sources of energy.
He mentioned his alliance with Tesla electric car company founder Elon Musk, who joined him at a rally Saturday in Butler, where Trump survived an assassination attempt July 13.
“I love electric cars. You know why? Because I think Elon is great,” he said. “But you know what I like them for? What the market is … We're going to have whatever the market wants. We're going to have gasoline power. We're going to have hybrids.”
He promised to “make Pennsylvania an energy supplier to the entire world.” Harris would “double, triple, quadruple” energy prices, he said.
Trump: Kamala will raise taxes
“Kamala Harris is going to significantly raise taxes,” he said. “Kamala's plan will raise families’ taxes by nearly $2,600 a year.”
Trump promised to eliminate taxes on Social Security, tips and overtime and cuts taxes for manufacturers who build in America from 21% to 15%.
“Kamala will deliver a 1929-style depression, not recession,” he said. “I will deliver lower taxes, lower regulations, low energy costs, low interest rates, low inflation, and the greatest economy in the history of the world, which we had four years ago. We had that.”
Harris says Trump’s plan will raise Americans’ taxes an average of $4,000 a year.
Trump made no mention of abortion and its role in the campaign but tried to appeal to women.
He also said the nation’s border with Mexico was better when he was president and limited human trafficking.
"Four years ago, we the best border in our country's history, and that included human trafficking, mostly in women, by the way,” he said.
Trump also said he would ban allowing men to play women’s sports, pledging to get “transgender insanity" and critical race theory "the Hell out of our schools."
He blamed Harris for immigrant crime, referred to her as dumb, called her a Communist and “radical left Marxist” and falsely claimed the administration diverted disaster aid for Hurricane Helene victims to illegal immigrants.
Numerous, state, local and federal officials managing Helene’s aftermath have denied the administration mishandled the response.
“Everything will be beautiful once I take office,” Trump said.
Trump also:
- Honored Corey Comperatore, the firefighter who died from a bullet wound during the Butler assassination attempt as he covered his family.
- Promoted a new book written by his wife, Melania.
- Referred to the media once again as “fake news,” “totally crooked” and “the enemy of the people.”
Musk was Trump’s big personality guest at the Butler rally, but he brought another here: former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. He hinted both men could be part of his administration if he’s elected.
“If you want to seal the border, vote Trump,” Ramaswamy said. “If you want to grow the economy, vote Trump. If you want to restore law and order in this country, vote Trump, if you want to stay out of World War Three in this country, vote Trump.”
Democratic, union responses
On ABC’s “The View” program Tuesday, Harris was asked how if she would have done anything differently than Biden the last four years.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said.
In a late morning Zoom call before the mid-afternoon rally, Democrats portrayed Trump as a friend of the rich who would raise taxes on middle-class Americans.
In the pre-rally Democratic conference call, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti welcomed Trump to Scranton, but said Pennsylvania had fewer jobs by the time he left office in January 2021.
By comparison, President Joe Biden and Harris added 500,000 jobs, she said. She also blamed Trump for flubbing the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Biden-Harris administration’s American Rescue plan enabled a construction and renovation boom in Scranton, she said.
“That's why, when Donald Trump comes here today, he will drive in, he will see excavators, bridge work, road work,” Cognetti said. “Under the Biden-Harris administration, we have not had the joke of infrastructure week that we had under Donald Trump. We have an infrastructure decade and jobs, so many job opportunities, career opportunities for folks here in northeastern Pennsylvania.”
Trump said Biden only brought back jobs lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, which he referred to as “bounce-back jobs.”
Billy Williams, a member of Laborers’ Local 57 in Philadelphia, said Harris will protect the ability to join a union while Trump will “destroy the union way of life.”
“He gave CEOs tax cuts while leaving Pennsylvania workers in the dust,” Williams said. “Just two weeks ago, Trump bragged about getting away with stiffing workers and not paying them overtime. He recently cheered on his buddy Elon Musk for firing striking workers.”
