Trump to turn full focus on VP at his first rally since Biden’s exit
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Donald Trump held his first public campaign rally since President Joe Biden dropped out of a 2024 matchup that both major parties had spent months preparing for, leaving the former president to direct his ire toward his likely new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump was expected to turn his full focus on Harris as he stopped Wednesday in North Carolina, a swing state that Trump has carried in the past, but Democrats have seen as pivotal. The former president’s trip to the state shows he’s still concerned about keeping it in his column this November, even as his team reaches for wins in traditionally Democratic-leaning states like Minnesota, which Trump is set to visit on Saturday.
With Biden’s abrupt departure from the presidential race and Harris edging closer and closer to officially being the Democrats’ general election pick, Trump has ramped up his criticism of the vice president, whom he’s characterized as “the same as Biden but much more radical.”
He has blamed her for what he portrays as the Biden administration’s failures, particularly on security along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump has also hedged on plans for an expected debate with Harris, first saying that he wanted Fox News, not ABC, to host the matchup he had originally scheduled for September with Biden. On Tuesday, Trump appeared to tweak that message again, saying on a call with reporters that he’d like to debate Harris “more than once” but not committing to appearing at the debate currently on the books and saying he’d only agreed to debate Biden twice, not Harris.
Harris, meanwhile, spent Wednesday in Indiana, telling members of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta that “we are not playing around” and asked for their help in electing her president in November, an election she characterized as “a choice between two different visions for our nation, one focused on the future, the other focused on the past.”
Voters in Indiana haven’t backed a Democratic presidential candidate in nearly 16 years. But Harris, a woman of Black and South Asian descent, was speaking to a group already excited by her historic status as the likely Democratic nominee and one that her campaign hopes can expand its coalition.
North Carolina is a state Trump carried in both his previous campaigns but by less than 1.5 percentage points over Biden in 2020, the closest margin of any state Trump won. Trump stumped heavily in North Carolina even as the COVID-19 pandemic wore on, while Biden largely kept off the physical campaign trail and did not personally visit the state in the last 16 days of the election.
Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte — the state’s biggest city — was also the scene of Trump’s narrowest margin of victory in North Carolina’s GOP primary, edging out Nikki Haley by fewer than 8 percentage points.
Trump’s Charlotte event is his second campaign rally since a July 13 assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Days later, Trump accepted the GOP presidential nomination and gave a speech at the Republican National Convention, where his ear — injured in the shooting — was bandaged.