Former President Trump claimed that Vice President Harris is “guaranteed” to get the United States into World War III if she is elected president, continuing intense rhetoric common throughout the 2024 campaign.
Trump spoke at a rally in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania on Saturday, arguing that Harris would be incompetent at dealing with other country’s leaders like Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“To make her president would be to gamble with the lives of millions of people,” he said. “She would get us into a World War III guaranteed because she is too grossly incompetent to do the job.”
Trump continued that people’s “sons and daughters will end up getting drafted to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of.” Later in the speech, Trump vowed that he would avoid World War III even as the country has “never been so close” to it occurring.
Trump also repeated past arguments that conflicts like the one stemming from Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel would not have happened if he had been president.
The former president’s remarks come after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) released a letter on Friday denouncing Harris’s calling Trump a “fascist,” a term that Trump himself has used for Harris.
Johnson and McConnell said, “The Democratic nominee for President of the United States has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus. Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over.”
“Labeling a political opponent as a ‘fascist’ risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day,” they said, referencing the two assassination attempts on Trump earlier this year.
Harris had previously not used the word fascist to describe Trump but said she believed he is one at the CNN town hall she participated in on Wednesday. The answer came in response to a question about Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, saying Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist.”
Following the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, members of both parties called for toning down political rhetoric to avoid such a politically charged environment that could lead to incidents like that one. But language from both candidates largely returned to normal soon after.
