McCarthy tells Trump to stop questioning size of Harris's crowds
By Sarah Fortinsky - 8/12/24, 11:51 AM EDT
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Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) says former President Trump should stop questioning the size of Vice President Harris’s crowds at her campaign rallies and instead focus on her as a candidate.
“You've got to make this race not on personalities," McCarthy said Monday in an interview on Fox News. "Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position, when it comes to: What did she do as [California] attorney general on crime? ... What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?”
The former Speaker said Trump should also hit Harris on inflation, noting she was the tiebreaking vote on key legislation that has come to define the Biden-Harris administration. He also urged Trump to attack Harris for changing her position on certain policy views in the last couple of years.
“This is a perfect person to run against,” McCarthy said. “You thought John Kerry was a flip-flopper? She is the biggest flip-flop, with the most extreme positions, and you got a short time frame to do it.”
“So don't sit back, get out there and start making the case and use her own words to do it to her,” he added.
Trump has repeatedly focused on the large crowds at Harris’s rallies, even going so far as to suggest footage of them was created using artificial intelligence.
“There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” the former president wrote on Truth Social this weekend, responding to a photo of a Harris crowd outside a plane.
“She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches,” Trump later added.
Harris’s campaign fired back, shooting down any speculation about the legitimacy of the crowd.
“1) This is an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan,” the KamalaHQ account wrote on the social platform X, responding to a screenshot of Trump’s post. “2) Trump has still not campaigned in a swing state in over a week… Low energy?”