US Election 2024: Democrat Kamala Harris addressed as estimated 75,000 people who gathered at the Ellipse near White House on Tuesday evening, a week before the November 5 election – in what many call a neck-and-neck fight against her Republican rival Donald Trump.
The Ellipse, sometimes referred to as President's Park South, is the same spot in Washington where Donald Trump hosted his infamous ‘Stop the Steal’ rally on January 6, 2021, which followed a deadly mob attack on the US Capitol.
The Vice President's team called the Ellipse rally on October 29 evening her campaign's ‘closing argument’ before the November 5 US Presdiential Polls.
Harris warned US voters against Trump's bid to seize ‘unchecked power’ as the race for the White House entered its final week.
The venue assumes symbolic significance since it brings back memories of Trump's 2021 speech months after Democratic candidate Biden defeated him in the Presidential Election
Trump had alleged voter fraud and urged supporters to fight. Hundreds of them then stormed the Capitol and indulged in arson and rioting in was later referred to as an attempted self-coup d'état two months after Trump’s defeat.
Harris chose the spot to draw a contrast between her vision for the country and Trump's continued ‘lies’ about the 2020 election, and the risk that, according to her his return to the White House would pose for the nation.
This was Harris’ first major campaign speech outdoors in Washington as most of the big rallies this year have been in arenas or stadiums in battleground states.
In 2021, thousands of his supporters stood on the Ellipse Park, as an angry Trump told his supporters the election had been stolen from him.
“We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about," Trump told the crowd. “And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with: We will stop the steal. Today I will lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election and we won it by a landslide. This was not a close election,” the former President said.
“And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said
Trump's speech came after weeks of failed legal challenges in which Trump claimed widespread voter fraud. His attorneys put forward unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, including the idea that voting machines were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez.
The challenges were roundly dismissed, including by judges who had been appointed by Trump himself or other Republicans, the AP report said.
On December 19, 2020 Trump said in a post on X (the Twitter): “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Trump told the crowd that day at the end of his speech it was time to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol with a rambling directive to get involved.
Hours later, Trump finally conceded and pledged an "orderly transition" of power to President-elect Joe Biden on January, 20, 2021.
In the congressional hearings on the events of January 6, 2021, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson recounted how Trump was dismissive when told that some in his crowd at the Ellipse were armed, the AP report said.
Trump went back to the White House instead. Rioters stormed the Senate chamber and ransacked Capitol offices for hours. They beat law enforcement personnel, leaving roughly 140 injured. Seven people died in the wake of the attack, including a rioter shot by police.
More than 1,500 people have been charged in the Capitol siege in the years since.
(With inputs from AP)
