It’s a bold move to call for national unity and warn that your opponent is a tyrant while the guy you replaced in a bloodless coup is trashing half of the electorate. 

One week before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris used her “closing arguments” in D.C. on Tuesday night to feebly argue that she’s the change candidate, that she is democracy and unity, and that former President Donald Trump is despotism and tyranny. She brazenly said as much as her boss, acting President Joe Biden — whose administration has furiously tried to imprison its political enemies — pulled a Hillary Clinton.

“Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community. … Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. … The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden told NBC News Senior White House Correspondent Gabe Gutierrez. 

Biden was taking a shot at Trump’s rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden, at which insult comedian Tony Hinchcliffe joked about Puerto Rico’s very real trash problem. 

“There’s a lot going on. Like, I don’t know if you know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” the comedian said in an equal-opportunity dig. Hinchcliffe poked fun at everyone at the Trump rally, but the desperate left, the Harris campaign, and their public-relations operation inside corporate media have made the joke a political talking point tantamount to Trump’s mean tweets. 

Biden’s garbage comment was reminiscent of failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s speech at a New York City fundraiser less than two months before the 2016 election. In that speech, she said half of Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables.” 

That didn’t work out so well for the former secretary of state and wife of a former Democrat president and reputed sex offender. 

‘We Are Not Going Back’

And Harris’ rant about Trump as a threat to democracy was the tired, old monologue that Americans have heard from a campaign that only exists because Democrat Party elites pushed out doddering Biden in July and anointed Harris as the replacement candidate. So much for the 14 million voters who selected Biden as their nominee. So much for the “defenders of democracy.” 

Harris delivered her faux unity speech in front of what the accomplice media was obliged to describe as a “massive crowd” at the Ellipse near the White House. The location was by design, so Harris could pretend to speak soberly at the location where nearly four years ago Trump addressed protesters before the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol.

The vice president — between peppy campaign music, vibrant light shows, neon wrist bracelets adorned by attendees, and a generally festive atmosphere — tried and failed to set a somber tone. She wanted Americans to know that Donald Trump is all about sowing fear and division while she delivered a bitterly divisive campaign speech. While Harris interspersed her cackling catchphrases of joy and family, she spent most of the speech painting a fearful and dark picture of America’s future with Trump in the White House. 

“It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division,” Harris declared. 

She again pounded the campaign talking point that Trump will target his political enemies if elected. That, too, has been a bold choice of messaging from a candidate who has dutifully served an administration that has persecuted and prosecuted its No. 1 political opponent and a long line of conservatives. 

“The fact that someone disagrees with us does not make them the enemy within,” Harris preached. She should tell that to the many parents Biden’s Department of Justice sought to harass for objecting to far-left public school policies and instruction they disagreed with.

As the vice president again and again colored Trump as a tyrant and dictator in waiting, she insisted that it was “time to stop pointing fingers … and start locking arms.” 

She said it was “time for a new generation of leadership in America.” For Americans who have slogged through pocketbook-breaking inflation, a border invasion, and general insecurity driven by the Biden-Harris leftist agenda and its accompanying failures of the past four years, the idea that Harris is the change candidate may be the biggest rhetorical hole the vice president ripped through reality during her “closing arguments.” 

“We are not going back,” Harris declared, while asking Americans to return her to the White House, this time as president and leader of the free world. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.