The ex-president and vice-president converge on a unifying message: if I lose, the country will not be the same
In a speech filled with promises, falsehoods, insults and jokes delivered by Donald Trump to a packed Wisconsin arena six days before the presidential election, one line stood out: “November 5 will be the most important day in the history of our country.”
Hyperbole? Undoubtedly, and exactly the sort that the former president has used repeatedly in the past months, as he plots a return to the White House that Joe Biden ousted him from four years ago. Did it ring true to his supporters? For many, the answer was yes.
“We’re screwed. Plain English, we’re screwed,” 72-year-old retiree John Martin replied when asked what would happen if Trump lost at the ballot box on Tuesday. “We’re going to become a third-world country,” added Mary Watermolen, 55, as the couple left Trump’s speech in Green Bay on Wednesday evening.
Two days earlier and hundreds of miles away, Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Trump’s Democratic opponent, had used similar framing to describe the stakes of the election to hundreds of people who turned out to see her in a Michigan college town.
“I do believe Donald Trump to be an unserious man, but the consequences of him ever being president again are brutally serious, brutally serious,” she said at a city park in Ann Arbor. “So much is on the line in this election, and this is not 2016 or 2020. We can all see that Donald Trump is even more unstable and more unhinged, and now he wants unchecked power, and this time … there will be no one there to stop him.”
They have little in common as people or politicians, but as they campaigned in swing states and elsewhere in the final week before the presidential election, both the vice-president and former president converged on a unifying message to their supporters: America is at a turning point, and if I lose, the country will not be the same.
It was in Harris’s speech on Tuesday evening, held at the same Washington DC park from which Trump addressed his followers who would go on to storm the Capitol on January 6. “This election is more than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American, or one ruled by chaos and division,” she said.
And it was laced throughout the conversation on Thursday evening in a suburb of Phoenix, where Trump sat down with a fawning Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator. “She’s dumb as a rock, and you can’t have that,” he said of Harris. “We love our country too much. You can’t have it, we just went through four years of it. You can’t have any more. A country can only take so much.”
The sentiment now seems certain to be on the minds of tens of millions of Americans who will vote on Tuesday.
