WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris led with criticism of former President Donald Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in her closing pitch to the American people on Tuesday, with a week to go until election day.
Harris gave a 30-minute speech at The Ellipse, the same site at which her Republican opponent spoke and incited the mob on Jan. 6. She urged the crowd to remember the violence and to think clearly about “who Donald Trump is.”
“[Trump] sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election,” Harris said, within her first five minutes at the podium. “An election that he knew he lost.”
Her comments echo a growing sentiment among voters that aggression over election outcomes may ensue. According to an October Pew Research Center survey, 66% of registered American voters say the threat of political violence is a major problem in the United States today.
The brother of U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died in the January 6 insurrection, also spoke at the event.
“He incited the crowd to riot, while my brother and his fellow officers put their lives at risk,” Craig Sicknick said. “Now, Mr. Trump is promising to pardon the convicted criminals who attacked our Capitol, killing my brother.”
Political violence has posed a threat in every election, but this risk has been significantly exacerbated by recent rhetoric, according to Jacob Ware, a research fellow who focuses on terrorism and counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“We are going to see election violence this year. We are in an elevated threat environment, and it is very likely to lead to violence,” Ware said.
He added that both candidates’ “existential language” about the stakes of the election is problematic, as they have staked out a position that “if we lose this election, there won’t be another election in this country.”
Ware also said that the political right has wielded uniquely violent and incendiary rhetoric, referencing a March 2024 comment by Trump at an Ohio rally that there would be a “bloodbath” if he isn’t re-elected.
“What it really creates is a permissive environment for violence, where when attacks happen, it’s almost been already excused, and so that is very dangerous,” Ware said.
Trump responded after the March rally by saying that he only used the word in reference to economic outcomes if defeated in the November election.
The former president also responded to Harris’ Tuesday speech in a post on X shortly after the event. “While I am running a campaign of positive solutions to save America, Kamala Harris is running a campaign of hate,” Trump said. “She has spent all week comparing her political opponents to the most evil mass murderers in history.”
Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, criticized Harris as “lying, name-calling, and clinging to the past.”
Harris’s supporters in the crowd expressed concern about violence from Trump’s supporters after the election if she wins.
“I had a friend whose nephew was actually in the Capitol Police, who was there [on January 6], and it was extremely frightening,” said Debra Sprague, a Harris supporter and Associate Professor at George Mason University.
She recalled the shock of watching the riot unfold almost four years ago.
“I just couldn’t believe that that would happen in America, that we would be at a point where democracy is on the cusp of dying.”
