The Trump campaign now hopes to tie Harris to Biden’s lowest moment: Afghanistan
Early Monday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris released a statement commemorating the deaths of 13 US service members in Afghanistan. Those service members died in a terror attack during the US withdrawal from the country.
It was a clear pre-emptive strike against Republicans. During the RNC, Republicans made a point of highlighting those deaths. They even invited loved ones of the fallen onstage to publicly blame Biden.
“I will never forget meeting many of them on a trip to Afghanistan as a US Senator,” Harris said in her Monday statement, during which she also listed the names of the dead. “These American service members possessed extraordinary skill, discipline, and dedication. I had then, and will always have, immense pride in their service and in the strength, courage, and excellence of the US military, the greatest fighting force the world has ever known.”
Former president Donald Trump’s campaign released a video about the service members’ deaths. “To this day, Kamala Harris has never mentioned these fallen soldiers' names,” the video stated — an out-of-date proclamation, considering Harris’s earlier words.
The video concluded on the message: “President Trump will never forget them.” The former president himself visited Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath on the graves of fallen service members later that morning.
At the same time, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that Congress will posthumously award the 13 service members the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award Congress can bestow.
Certainly recognizing US service members who died while getting Americans and their allies out of a war zone as the Taliban took over is the least the US can do to honor their memories. But tellingly, Senator Steve Daines, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, passed the legislation in the Senate. That’s a sign they see this as a chance to exploit Democrats’ weaknesses and to tie Harris to one of the low points of the Biden administration, arguably one from which he never fully recovered.
In recent weeks, Harris has sought to burnish her credibility as a potential future commander-in-chief. During her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, she said she would “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Her selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a veteran of the National Guard, is also supposed to show that she takes national security seriously.
Admittedly, Harris lacks sufficient national security experience on the level that Biden had. Whereas Biden had served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was Barack Obama’s chief emissary (given that Obama lacked foreign policy experience), Harris only spent a brief amount of time in the Senate.
It makes some amount of sense, then, that Republicans intend to attack her on national security as a large part of their electoral campaign tactics.
When Trump spoke to US National Guard officers on Tuesday, he accused her of being weak on terrorism as well.
“Kamala Harris is letting terrorists come into our country at record numbers and letting jihadists pour into our homeland by the thousands and thousands and thousands,” he said. “Can’t do that.”
The conventions have now wrapped up and the final stretch of the election is here. Trump has found himself increasingly on defense against Harris. The Harris campaign wants to keep microphones on during their set debate on ABC News during September 10; Trump seems extremely unwilling to agree to that.
“Why would I do the debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” he said on Truth Social on Monday, implying that he may still pull out.
“We’re thinking about it,” he later told reporters who asked whether that was a possibility. “They also want to change the rules. You know, the deal was we keep the same rules. Now, all of a sudden they want to make a change in the rules because she can’t answer questions.”
For the past month, Trump has failed to define Harris as a candidate, despite the fact that she has been vice president for almost two years and she ran a presidential campaign in 2019 that didn’t even make it to the primary contests.
Despite the fact that voters trust Trump more on immigration, he has not been able to capitalize on this strength, either. This new angle shows that they hope that Harris can be weakened on another front.
