Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver the closing argument of her campaign tonight in front of the Ellipse, a site near the White House where former President Donald Trump spoke before the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.
The event is expected to attract about 20,000 people, according to its National Park Service permit. An earlier permit application filed on Oct. 18 by the Harris campaign for the vice president to speak at the National Mall said it expected to draw nearly 8,000.
In the final weeks of her campaign, Harris has doubled down on the claims that Trump is a “unfit to serve” and a “fascist.”
She used the term to describe him during her Town Hall with CNN in Pennsylvania last week. She referenced the words of the former president’s longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly, telling the New York Times that he met the definition of one.
Trump delivered his own closing message to supporters in a New York rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made a controversial joke where he referred to Puerto Rico as, “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”
This triggered a response from both sides of the aisle.
Puerto Rican artists like Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez reposted a video made by the vice president on the same day where she talked about her plans for the island.
“The joke bombed for a reason,” said Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott on X. “I will always do whatever I can to help any Puerto Rican in Florida.”
Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar said she was “disgusted” by the comments, while Rep. Carlos Gimenez called them “completely classless and in poor taste.”
This backlash led to Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, releasing a statement that the joke does not “reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
Harris, who passed by a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia on Sunday in an effort to court the 300,000 voters from the island in Pennsylvania, used the statement to contrast her approach to them.
When asked about the artists’ endorsements, she said, “they understand that they want a president of the United States who is about uplifting the people and not berating, not calling America a garbage can, which is what Donald Trump, those are the words he has used.”
President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by about 81,000 votes in 2020, and Trump won by about 44,000 in 2016.
