Election 2024: Harris campaign pushes joy while Trump's paints darker picture
Associated PressWASHINGTON — At the top of his first speech as her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz turned to Vice President Kamala Harris and declared, “Thank you for bringing back the joy.” The next day, Harris took the theme a step further, branding the Democratic ticket “joyful warriors.” Contrast that with former President Donald Trump, who opened a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida a few days later by saying, “We have a lot of bad things coming up,” and predicting the U.S. could fall into an economic depression unseen since the dark days of 1929 or even another world war. “I think that our country is, right now, in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in, from an economic standpoint, from a safety standpoint,” Trump said Thursday. His campaign appearances have included a long list of other warnings that have veered into the apocalyptic, saying that if he’s not elected, “we’re not going to have a country anymore,” that “the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” and that under a Harris administration, “Social Security will buckle and collapse” and “the suburbs will be overrun with violent crime and savage foreign gangs.” During his Republican National Convention speech last month, where his advisers said Trump would seem changed and more personal after surviving an attempted assassination, the former president did strike a different tone — at least to start. He said early on that he had “a message of confidence, strength and hope” and sought to “launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed.” But by the end, Trump had returned to predictions of doom, twice warning, “Bad things are going to happen.” Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has drawn a sharp contrast with Walz.