In a likely preview of the months ahead, Vice President Kamala Harris knocked former President Donald Trump’s ties to the oil industry Tuesday during her first appearance on the campaign trail as Democrats’ likely nominee.
The vice president traveled to Milwaukee for a campaign rally, where she laid out a case for her own presidency just two days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and threw his support behind her.
Harris, a former California attorney general, also previewed how she’ll campaign against the former president: as a prosecutor running against a convicted felon. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said of her time as attorney general and as a courtroom prosecutor prior to that.
Her campaign “is not just about us versus Donald Trump,” Harris said. “This campaign is about who we fight for.”
Trump, she said, “is relying on support from billionaires and big corporations, and he is trading access in exchange for campaign contributions.”
“A couple months ago, you all saw that a couple months ago at Mar-a-Lago, he literally promised Big Oil companies, Big Oil lobbyists, he would do their bidding for $1 billion in campaign donations,” Harris said, pointing to reports that Trump asked oil industry executives to donate $1 billion to aid his presidential campaign.
“On the other hand, we are running a people-powered campaign,” Harris said, celebrating “the best 24 hours of grassroots fundraising in presidential campaign history.”
Harris criticized Trump along those same lines Monday night as she spoke to staff at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.
“As district attorney, to go after polluters, I created one of the first environmental justice units in our nation,” Harris said then. “Donald Trump stood in Mar-a-Lago and told Big Oil lobbyists he would do their bidding for a $1 billion campaign contribution.”
