Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris stopped her fans from getting too wild with their Trump bashing at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday.
On the second day of her battleground blitz with running mate Tim Walz, when she got to the point in her now-familiar stump speech about her days prosecuting predators, fraudsters and scammers, supporters, like those in Philadelphia on Tuesday, were just starting to chant “lock him up” when Harris deviated from the script.
“Well, hold on,” she said, holding out her hand as if to placate the crowd in Eau Claire, Wisc. “You know what, the courts are going to handle that part of it. What we’re gonna do is beat him in November.”
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She laughed, and the crowd roared.
The moment represented the smooth diffusion of a pattern that could begin to look unseemly for the vice president. By Wednesday, calls to “lock him up” had become a regular occurrence during Harris’ appearances on the campaign trail, a riff on the “lock her up” chants that Trump’s MAGA rally goers deployed against Hillary Clinton.
The demands to imprison the 2016 Democratic nominee stemmed from her use of a private email address for official State Department communications, which the FBI attributed to carelessness. Trump denied ever saying, “lock her up,” though media examinations of that claim found that he did.
Unlike Clinton, the former president is now a convicted felon. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 18 for charges related to hiding hush money payments. The former president could face up to four years in prison, but many experts think a lesser sentence is more likely.
Courts are still adjudicating his actions related to election interference and storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
