Harris and Trump rally in Milwaukee as they make final Wisconsin push

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump converged on Milwaukee on Friday night during their final scheduled visits to Wisconsin, a battleground state where neither of them has a lead and which is considered particularly essential to a Harris victory.

With the election just three days away, Harris adopted an upbeat tone during an evening of musical performances and urged her supporters in Milwaukee, where early voting lags the balloting in other parts of the state, to “please get to it when you can.”

The rally for Trump, who was returning to the site of his Republican coronation in July, had an entirely different tone. He employed fear-mongering language about immigration, repeated his 2020 election lies and lobbed insults at his political foes. He also suggested that Milwaukee’s Greek-born basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is Black, seemed less Greek than Trump did, and spent several minutes erupting in frustration over a faulty microphone.

Yet the rallies were overshadowed by fallout earlier in the day from Trump’s latest use of violent language to describe his political opponents. Late Thursday, in Arizona, he suggested that former Rep. Liz Cheney, one of his fiercest Republican critics, should be put somewhere “with nine barrels shooting at her.”

As Harris began her day in Wisconsin at the Madison airport, she told reporters Trump’s remarks “must be disqualifying.”

He sought to clean up his comments on Friday by repeating them in marginally softer terms. He also attacked Harris for campaigning with Cheney.

Polls show Harris and Trump in a virtual dead heat in Wisconsin, as they are in the other battleground states. Democrats in the state are confident about Harris’ standing in part because they expect their usual strong turnout from Dane County, which includes the state capital, Madison, though turnout in Milwaukee County has lagged behind the rest of the state.

“For you who have not yet voted, no judgment,” Harris said at her rally in West Allis, just west of Milwaukee.

The evening had the sort of incongruous moments that can take place only in the final days of a presidential campaign. Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin delivered her standard stump speech, but only after a two-song set from Alabama rapper Flo Milli, part of a concert for the crowd of 12,000 before Harris spoke.

In case there were any doubt whom the Harris campaign was trying to turn out to vote, every speaker and performer at the rally was Black – except for Baldwin. Cardi B, a hip-hop artist who had been a high-profile surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders when he ran for president in 2020, said she would not have voted for President Joe Biden but was backing Harris.

“I wasn’t going to vote this time, but when Kamala Harris joined the race, she changed my mind completely,” Cardi B said.

To help encourage Milwaukee voters, the Harris campaign announced that former President Barack Obama would hold his own rally in the city on Sunday. Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, is scheduled for three Wisconsin stops on Monday, including an evening rally in Milwaukee.

“We know what’s going on across town right now,” Mayor Cavalier Johnson of Milwaukee said at the Harris rally. “Our community, we are literally, quite literally, the crossroads of this election.”

Trump returned to the Fiserv Forum, which hosted the Republican National Convention in July, though he appeared before a smaller crowd: Parts of the arena’s upper sections were covered by curtains, and the open areas were not full for most of his speech.

At one point, Trump complimented the arena’s basketball team, the Milwaukee Bucks, and their star player, Antetokounmpo. Then he added of Antetokounmpo, the son of African immigrants who was raised in Athens: “Who has more Greek in him? The Greek or me? I think we have about the same, right?”

The rally was Trump’s final scheduled event in Wisconsin, but his closing pitch was derailed by problems with the microphone that seemed to frustrate him during a particularly busy stretch of the campaign in which his message has been overshadowed by his remarks about Puerto Ricans, women and Cheney.

After members of the crowd began chanting that they could not hear him properly, Trump yanked the microphone out of its holder. At one point, he pantomimed adjusting the microphone setup and bobbing down toward it, to the laughter of the crowd.

But Trump, standing in front of people waving signs that said “Trump will fix it,” was visibly irritated by the technical issue. “Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?” he asked the crowd, on a day when his violent language had already drawn attention.

During stops in Michigan earlier in the day, Trump sought to clarify the remarks he had made Thursday that imagined violence directed at Cheney – a former member of Congress from Wyoming and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. The former president’s outburst about her intensified his dispute with one of the most prominent political families in the nation and drew criticism from leaders of both parties.

“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said during a Thursday event in Glendale, Arizona, with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Cheney, one of the highest-profile Republicans in the nation to break with her party and endorse Harris, responded Friday morning that “this is how dictators destroy free nations.”

Trump repeated the thrust of his remarks at events on Friday, calling Cheney a “disaster” and a “coward,” and saying that he was attacking her hawkish foreign policy views. But the former president – who has previously called for Cheney to be jailed – backed away slightly from the menacing hypothetical that provoked alarm from his political opponents.

“If you gave Liz Cheney a gun and put her into facing the other side with guns pointing at her, she wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” he said at a rally in Warren, Michigan, a Detroit suburb.

Trump’s repeated attacks on Cheney as a warmonger came as he continued to court Michigan’s sizable population of Arab Americans, trying to harness anger at the Biden administration over its support for Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip.

Before his rally, he stopped to shake hands with voters at a restaurant in Dearborn, the center of the state’s Arab American community. Onstage in Warren, he attacked Harris for stumping with Cheney given her father’s key role in the Iraq War.

At the same time, Trump’s attempt to woo both Jewish American voters and Arab American voters away from Democrats has resulted in some clumsiness. Standing in front of about three dozen Arab American voters in Dearborn, he blamed the lack of peace on “the clowns you have, uh, in the Middle East” and in the United States.

He would not answer a question about whether he thought Israel’s military actions in Gaza were tantamount to genocide, and though he insisted that he had discussed a specific plan to end the conflict in the Middle East, he again declined to offer any details.

At his Warren rally, he opened by focusing on the economy, pointing to a report that showed weak job growth in October, which he said bolstered his argument that Harris would be bad for the economy. “If she gets four more years, your family is never going to – you’re never going to recover from these stupid people,” he said.

Trump bluntly acknowledged that the numbers could be politically beneficial to him. “Our economy is a total disaster and is expected to get very substantially worse,” he said. “It’s a wonderful time for me coming in, you know – this is what I want. Now, I would rather come in when things are going in the right direction, but we’re going to get it straightened out fast.”

Trump’s advisers believe the economy is his strongest issue, and he spent time in Wisconsin criticizing the job report. But as is often the case, his closing message was centered on himself. He posited that he did not have to run for office but could be on a beach somewhere with beautiful waves smacking him in the face.

“I don’t have to be here, but if I had my choice, I’d rather be right here, with a broken-down” microphone in Wisconsin, he said, adding an expletive.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.