Tipsheet

Is Kamala Done for? Here's How She's Preparing for Upcoming Events.

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  October 22, 2024 3:15 PM

We're just two weeks away from the election, but Vice President Kamala Harris will not be on the campaign trail today. Such a move earned strong words from former and potentially future President Donald Trump.

"I was going to hit her really hard on the trail today," Trump said about Harris, "but now I don't have to 'cause she's off, she's off." To laughter from the crowd, Trump continued that he "couldn't get over it." 

"Who the hell takes off when you have 14 days left?! And she'll take a couple of more days off, too," Trump predicted. "You know? She's lazy as hell and she's got that reputation. She's a radical left lunatic," the Republican nominee continued, reminding that Harris is "further left than Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas," referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), to more laughter from the crowd. 

"They're out there," Trump said about the three leftists. Harris is "the furthest left," he continued, warning, as he's done before, that we "can't have a Marxist" for president. 

The remarks came while Trump was doing a Latino roundtable event in Doral, Florida. 

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Trump wasn't the only one to mock Harris for sitting out on the sidelines. During Tuesday morning's "Wake Up America" on Newsmax, host Sharla McBride noted that Harris is "taking the day off" and "is gonna spend all day just to prepare for an NBC interview, which will be taped, of course."

"You're a football coach," McBride said to her guest, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). "This would be like two weeks before the national championship if you decided not to practice. Does this make sense to you?"

With a chuckle, the senator offered, "Well, I think they're just trying to keep her off camera, to be honest with you," adding that "she's been a disaster" and "her poll numbers keep going down." 

Tuberville also spoke positively of Trump in contrast, describing him as "an Energizer bunny" and one "who does not quit," as "he just keeps going, and going, and going." The senator shared how Trump's even called him before at two or three o'clock in the morning to ask what he's doing, and only sleeps two or three hours a night.

"But, he loves what he's doing, he loves the country," Tuberville continued about Trump. In a more serious tone, the senator made clear that Trump is "our only chance. We can't lose this. We can't have another four years of this nonsense of spending money that we don't have, of all the things that are going on in foreign wars. He will get us out of the foreign wars, he will get us back to spending the right way, but we've got to get identity back in our country. Right now, we don't have an identity and the Democrats are to blame for it because they pushed this agenda that is totally nonsense."

Harris has not had much luck with pretaped interviews or other events. The "town hall" she did with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) on Monday in Michigan didn't even allow audience members to ask questions, as they instead went with "predetermined" ones. 

Ric Grenell also chimed in on X about Harris "taking a day off from campaigning," noting that former President Barack Obama will be campaigning for her. The former president, who came under fire for trying to bully black men into voting for Harris during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania earlier this month, will be in Detroit with Eminem.

POLITICO, which has been particularly favorable to Harris and particularly harsh towards Trump for this race, focused on the campaign stop during their Tuesday PM Playbook, "The two-week blitz begins." It's something of an ironic headline, given that Harris herself isn't participating in Tuesday's "blitz."

While this edition of Playbook hit Trump for moving campaign events, they still spoke about how Obama will be the one campaigning in Detroit. Further, Harris will be spending her time in Texas to focus on her pet issue of abortion in a state she is almost certainly not going to win:

HAPPENING TODAY — Tonight, former President BARACK OBAMA will campaign for Harris in Detroit. Introducing him at the rally will be MARSHALL MATHERS , the rapper better known as EMINEM, CNN reports. It’s an intriguing choice that can be read as a play for headlines, a play for Detroit-area men, a play for elder millennials, a play for middle-class white suburbanites (like Macomb native Mathers himself), a play for the affections of young-ish voters, or all of the above.

...

HAPPENING THIS WEEK — Harris will head to the Lone Star State to speak to voters at “ground zero of state-level abortion bans in the post-Roe era,” Myah Ward writes.

Why Texas, a state she’s unlikely to win? “[T]hink less about the location and more about the national message,” Myah writes. “The campaign stop is the latest effort to elevate an issue that fueled Democrats to a better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterms. And it underscores the Harris campaign’s belief that Trump’s position on abortion can once again persuade women — especially white women without a college degree — to vote for her.”

Joining Harris in Houston on Friday will be Democratic Senate hopeful Rep. COLIN ALLRED, who narrowly trails Republican Sen. TED CRUZ in recent polls. While still a reach for Democrats, “an Allred win would be critical to Harris’ hopes of working with a Democratic Senate majority should she win in November,” The Texas Tribune’s Jasper Scherer reports.

Trump will do a Friday interview with Joe Rogan, as POLITICO also reported on Tuesday. 

Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign senior advisor, also spoke to Newsmax on Tuesday about Trump's busy schedule, highlighting how "President Trump is going to be everywhere," in contrast to the "lazy" Harris-Walz ticket. 

Lewandowski also mocked Harris' campaign strategy, in particular noting how she's "doing one interview for about 15 minutes which will probably be edited subjectively and then she'll, uh, be exhausted for the rest of the day." He made clear that he "will put Donald Trump's schedule up against anybody who's campaigning for president, who has ever campaigned for president. And the American people see it. They see him out working and taking nothing for granted."

The American people, Lewandowski added, also "see that Vice President Harris and Tim Walz are lazy. They won't fix this country, and they want someone who's willing to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to put our country and make it great again, and that's what Donald Trump is doing."

Harris isn't the only one in the Harris-Walz campaign shifting around events, though. Spectrum News reported on Tuesday that "Gwen Walz’s Tuesday visit to Maine canceled," where she was supposed to give yet another speech promoting the ticket's obsession with abortion.