Rallying supporters at her first event with her new running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris said she has taken on \u201cperpetrators of all kinds\u201d as a prosecutor, \u201cSo hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump\u2019s type.\u201d<\/p>\n
The attack line, a signature of her nascent presidential campaign, immediately garnered chants of \u201cLock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!\u201d from the crowd of 12,000 on Tuesday night in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
Harris swiftly interrupted rallygoers, saying \u201chold on, hold on,\u201d and went on to declare that her campaign with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was \u201cnot just a fight against Donald Trump,\u201d but a \u201cfight for the future.\u201d The chants broke out again, when Walz told the crowd \u201cviolent crime was up under Donald Trump \u2014 and that\u2019s not even counting the crimes he committed.\u201d Walz then began to talk over the crowd and motioned with his hands to quiet down.<\/p>\n
The next day, at a rally in Eau Claire, Wis., at least one attendee was heard yelling again: \u201cLock him up!\u201d Harris responded: \u201cWe\u2019re gonna let the courts handle that. Our job is to beat him in November.\u201d She reiterated that statement, when a \u201clock him up\u201d chant began at a rally in Michigan later that day.<\/p>\n
Harris and Walz\u2019s efforts to defuse the \u201clock him up\u201d chant highlight the careful line Democrats must navigate as they run against Trump, the first former president convicted of a crime. Harris has emphasized her background as a prosecutor and her allies have embraced the prosecutor-versus-felon matchup. <\/p>\n
Yet Democrats have also approached Trump\u2019s criminal cases with caution, wanting to remind voters of his conviction while also avoiding politicizing his legal cases. <\/p>\n
The former president has leaned into his court cases by portraying himself as the victim of a weaponized judicial system and has claimed without evidence that the cases against him are coordinated with the White House. A special counsel acting independently of the White House brought the two federal cases against Trump. Local authorities brought two of the cases against him with no evidence they coordinated.<\/p>\n
In May, Trump was convicted by a New York jury of 34 charges connected to a 2016 hush money payment to an adult-film star. A judge has set Trump\u2019s sentencing date for Sept. 18. He faces charges in two other cases \u2014 a federal case in which he\u2019s charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results and a state case in Georgia, where he\u2019s charged with allegedly trying to undo the 2020 election results in the state. In a fourth case, a federal judge in Florida last month dismissed charges of mishandling classified documents. Trump has denied all wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
Democrats also want to avoid encouraging their supporters to mimic the \u201clock her up\u201d chants that Trump\u2019s supporters used in 2016 when he was running against Hillary Clinton. Those chants were suggesting Clinton should be imprisoned over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Clinton was not charged with a crime.<\/p>\n
Unlike Harris and Walz, Trump welcomed those chants during his 2016 rallies, and in several occasions explicitly said that Clinton should \u201cgo to jail.\u201d At a 2016 rally in Greensboro, N.C. he said: \u201cFor what she\u2019s done, they should lock her up, she\u2019s disgraceful.\u201d <\/p>\n
During Trump\u2019s presidency, his Department of Justice did not pursue prosecutorial action against Clinton. At a 2020 rally in Arizona, Trump\u2019s supporters also chanted \u201clock him up\u201d as Trump attacked Biden and his son Hunter Biden.<\/p>\n
At Harris\u2019s rallies this week, \u201cLock him up\u201d has not been the dominant chant. \u201cNot going back,\u201d for example, has been far more frequent. In Eau Claire, the crowd also chanted: \u201cThis is what democracy looks like\u201d as they waited for Harris and Walz to come onto the stage. At a Biden rally last month, before dropping his reelection bid, the president\u2019s supporters chanted, \u201cLock him up\u201d \u2014 which Biden did not discourage.<\/p>\n
Asked for comment about the chants, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, echoed the former president\u2019s baseless claims, saying, \u201cThese chants would be funny if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden had not literally weaponized the justice system against President Trump in an attempt to imprison him ahead of the election because they cannot beat him on the issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Harris campaign, meanwhile, didn\u2019t address the chants, in response to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis election is a choice between two visions: Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who are fighting for our future, our freedoms and to protect democracy and the rule of law, and the Trump-Vance Project 2025 agenda to rip away our freedoms, dismantle democracy when it doesn\u2019t serve them, and spread hatred, chaos and division,\u201d said Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika. \u201cThe contrast could not be more clear.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dylan Wells and Sabrina Rodriguez contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Rallying supporters at her first event with her new running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris said she has taken on \u201cperpetrators of all kinds\u201d as a prosecutor, \u201cSo hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump\u2019s type.\u201d The attack line, a signature of her nascent presidential campaign, immediately garnered chants of \u201cLock him up! […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7514,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}