Support truly
independent journalism
Donald Trump couldn’t let the Democratic National Convention end on Thursday without one last attempt to grab the spotlight from Kamala Harris.
The vice president became the first Black woman to headline a major party’s nomination for the presidency on Thursday evening as she officially took on the mantle of the Democratic party.
She delivered a moving speech that touched on her childhood while also broaching the topic of her 2024 opponent and the threat she says that he poses to the country’s future.
All the while, Trump himself was firing back — not in front of the cameras, but on Truth Social, his social media platform largely populated by his own diehard supporters.
In total, the former president fired off more than 50 posts on Truth Social during Harris’s 38-minute speech. Her address, energetic and punctuated by boisterous cheers, sharply contrasted Trump’s own acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last month, which touched on somber notes at the beginning as he spoke of his attempted assassination but quickly evolved into a ramble which lasted 92 minutes.
While Trump’s Truth Social barrage was billed ahead of time as a “fact check”, it was instead a collection of recycled attack lines and what appeared to be random thoughts spun off from the ex-president’s mind.
“IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” Trump questioned, seemingly in anger, at one point in her address. He didn’t elaborate further.
Other responses from Trump to lines from Harris’s speech were more direct and in-depth. They fell on themes Trump’s advisors clearly prepared for attacks — abortion rights and the bipartisan border security compromise that he instructed his allies to kill in Congress earlier this year.
“The Border Bill is one of the worst ever written, would have allowed millions of people into our Country, and it’s only a political ploy by her! It legalizes Illegal Immigration, and is a TOTAL DISASTER, WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE! She doesn’t need a Bill. As President, Crooked Joe and her could have just said, “CLOSE THE BORDER!” like I did – I didn’t have a Bill, I didn’t need a Bill. The Border Patrol respected me, they did their job. We had the Safest Border in Recorded History!” Trump wrote of the bill championed by James Lankford, the lead Republican negotiator, who blamed the former president for its downfall.
On abortion rights, he claimed: “Everybody, Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, and Conservatives, wanted Roe v. Wade TERMINATED, and brought back to the States,” – a factually untrue statement given that Democrats, at the minimum, have long supporter federal protections for abortion rights.
Trump’s “truthing” appeared to be a stream of consciousness in response to whatever Harris was saying in the moment, with little sign that his advisers had pre-written any material.
If there was one theme that Trump did return to frequently, it was the assertion that Harris, as vice president, had three years to pursue the policies which her campaign has vowed to push for in her administration, such as border security and legislation to reduce housing costs.
“She’s done nothing for three and a half years but talk, and that’s what she’s doing tonight, she’s complaining about everything but doing nothing! She should leave the Speech right now, go to Washington, D.C., close the Border, allow fracking in Pennsylvania and other places, and start doing the things she’s complaining about aren’t done,” he wrote in one post. In another: “No specific programs, ALL TALK, NO ACTION — Why didn’t she do it three and a half years ago?”
Trump is so rattled that he keeps hitting the buttons on his phone while he’s talking pic.twitter.com/U1rXcJPpsU
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 23, 2024
Later on Thursday, Trump continued his unhappy tirade against Harris on Fox News to Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum as they anchored the network’s coverage of the DNC. As he heatedly accused Harris of wanting to raise taxes, he could be heard accidentally hitting buttons on his phone’s keypad.
Harris’s four-day convention in Chicago ended with another star-studded night; pop star Pink performed, while comedian Dave Chappelle was spotted in the rafters and actor Ben Stiller was also seen onsite. One star not present: Beyonce, despite a quickly-circulating rumor egged on by the likes of Mitt Romney.
Harris and her new running mate Tim Walz will return to the campaign trail in the days ahead likely boosted by another polling bump stemming from their party’s successful convention. Harris had already risen in the polls ahead of the convention, and was on course to overtake Trump in a majority of the battleground states she’ll need to win the 2024 election.
Trump, meanwhile, is set to headline an event with his running mate JD Vance in Nevada tomorrow; the ex-president has held smaller-venue events throughout the week as he has sought to compete for coverage with his Democratic rivals.
