Donald Trump renews vow to ‘protect women’ as he and Kamala Harris clash in North Carolina ahead of election

GREENSBORO, N.C. - Donald Trump spent his last Saturday of the presidential race making a trio of meandering, profane speeches in which he spoke repeatedly about women - saying they have to be protected “at home in suburbia,” complaining that he is not allowed to call women beautiful and calling himself the “father of fertilization” - a disjointed appeal to voters with whom he faces a gender gap in the race against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris spoke 35 miles away in Charlotte, reprising her closing argument that Trump is not someone “who is thinking about how to make your life better,” as she cast a spotlight on his threats and inflammatory rhetoric.

She called him a candidate “who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance,” and warned he would walk into the Oval Office “stewing over an enemies list.”

The dueling appearances on the last weekend before Election Day offered a snapshot of a bruising, personal and highly competitive presidential race nearing the finish line.

As their fight swells to its final crescendo, both Trump and Harris campaigned in this battleground state Saturday evening, working to energize their supporters and persuade voters who have yet to make a decision to join their causes.

Polls show a tight contest nationwide.

The latest Iowa Poll offered a notable result Saturday evening: Harris with a slight lead over Trump in Iowa, according to the Des Moines Register-Mediacom poll.

Harris’s edge over Trump, 47 per cent to 44 per cent, a surprising finding in a state viewed as solidly red, was driven by independent and older female voters, the poll found.

Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller dismissed the poll’s results in a brief conversation with reporters Saturday night.

Both candidates held prime-time rallies in North Carolina, which is one of seven battleground states seen as key to victory.

Their planes were parked near each other on a tarmac in Charlotte on Saturday afternoon.

Trump also appeared in Salem, Virginia, on Saturday evening, making another unorthodox stop in a less-competitive blue state.

Harris appeared in Atlanta before taking the stage in Charlotte, where she was twice interrupted by people who appeared to be pro-Palestinian protesters.

North Carolina is effectively a must-win for Trump, whose path to the presidency becomes much more complicated if he falls short.

For Harris, a win could offset a loss in another key state and open up multiple pathways to victory. Polls remain close in North Carolina, with a very slight lead for Trump as of Saturday, according to The Washington Post’s polling average.

“We win this state, we’re going to win the whole ballgame,” Trump said Saturday. He also baselessly stoked more doubts about the legitimacy of the election, saying of Democrats, “let them cheat.”

He predicted Election Day would be “one of the most interesting days in the history of our country.”

Trump spoke for about 89 minutes here in Gastonia in what his team billed as his “closing message” before heading to Salem and then Greensboro.

He hit on his top policy issues, immigration and the economy - but he also made many extended detours and aired false or exaggerated claims.

He characterized the country as “invaded” by immigrants and made dark, baseless predictions about what a Harris presidency would look like, notably claiming that Americans “won’t own your house anymore.”

He discussed his disdain for ABC anchor David Muir (“a real stiff; what a dope”); his grandfather looking for gold in Alaska (“See, we always had a little entrepreneurial spirit, and he spent a lot of time in Alaska doing that”) and the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, inset, (“They say, oh, he brings up these names. … Well, that’s genius right? Dr. Hannibal Lecter, there’s nobody worse than him.”)

Trump again called himself the father of IVF in claiming that his support for in vitro fertilization helped the Alabama legislature protect access to it after a state Supreme Court ruling jeopardized it - despite the fact that he has taken credit for a role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which set the stage for attempts to restrict IVF.

After a week in which his remarks about women had drawn attention, Trump addressed women repeatedly on Saturday.

He referred to his comments from earlier in the week that he would protect women whether they “like it or not.”

Those comments drew a rebuke from Harris and her allies, who said they revealed his attitude toward women. Harris surrogate Mark Cuban then sparked a backlash among Trump supporters by saying Trump was never seen around “strong, intelligent women.”

Trump reprised the pledge on Saturday: “I will protect our women,” he said. “I think the women love me.”

He went on: “I believe that women have to be protected. Men have to be, children, everybody. But women have to be protected where they’re at home in suburbia.”

Trump spoke about the topic for several minutes, concluding: “There’s some women that are very beautiful in the audience. I would never say that because if I said - like that, that, her, her, her, her, we got a lot of them, her - if I said they were beautiful, that’s the end of my political career. You’re not allowed to say a woman is beautiful.”

In the same speech, Trump called Harris “this stupid woman” and said she would get overwhelmed as president.

He said she has “the economic understanding of a child” and predicted that she won’t be able to “handle” foreign leaders, saying she “will get overwhelmed, melt down and millions of people will die, perhaps.”

In Salem, Trump called members of the Roanoke College women’s swim team onstage, and they praised him for opposing transgender athletes participating in women’s sports. “I will not tell you how beautiful they are, but they are beautiful,” Trump said of the students.

He made an additional reference to sex-based etiquette when describing a SpaceX rocket landing and the mechanical arms that the Elon Musk-founded company engineered to catch the rocket.

“And then you see those arms, like you grab your beautiful baby, a beautiful child. -See? In the old days I would have said, like you grab your - girlfriend,” he said to laughter. “Now, I don’t say that anymore. I say like you grab your child.”

The Saturday rallies cap a week of intense campaigning on both sides in the hurtle to the finish line. On several topics, the candidates nearly appeared to be talking to each other.

Trump on Saturday mocked Harris’s calls for unity, saying: “She talks about unity and then she calls me Hitler.”

Harris has not called him Hitler, but she has said she agrees with Trump’s former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, that Trump meets the definition of a fascist.

Trump has threatened to jail people “involved in unscrupulous behavior” related to voting in this year’s elections and has described his domestic political opposition as “the enemy from within.”

At her rally, Harris heavily emphasized her pledge to work with people who disagree with her as she makes decisions. “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy,” Harris told her crowd in Charlotte.

“He wants to put them in jail. I will give them a seat at the table. That’s what real leadership looks like. That’s what strong leadership looks like.”

The vice president also sought to contrast what her presidency would look like compared to a second Trump term. “When I am elected, I will walk in on your behalf with my to-do list,” she said to cheers in Atlanta earlier in the day, before listing her agenda for bringing down the cost of living for average Americans.

At her Charlotte event, organizers and police rushed in and escorted people who appeared to be pro-Palestinian demonstrators out. The crowd responded by chanting “Kamala,” drowning out the protests.

Harris at first tried to talk over the demonstrators when they interrupted, then acknowledged them. “It’s all good,” Harris said. “And look, we all want that war in the Middle East to end. We want the hostages home. And when I am president, I will do everything in my power to make it so.”

In the tense lead-up to Election Day, millions of Americans have already cast ballots through early and mail-in voting, and both campaigns have doubled down on efforts to target certain voting blocs.

The candidates are largely maintaining a focus on the states that could tip the presidency as the historically consequential campaign draws to a close. Harris and Trump converged on Wisconsin on Friday, holding dueling rallies in Milwaukee.

In New York last Sunday, Trump hosted a comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.” On “Fox & Friends Weekend” on Saturday, Trump accused his opponents of having “stained” his Madison Square Garden rally last weekend by making “a big deal” out of the comedian’s comment.

Harris has spent the week working to appeal to voters in part by pointing to Trump’s comments, including his suggestion that former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney would change her views on war “when the guns are trained on her face,” and she has pushed to strike a patriotic, unifying note in the campaign’s closing days.

On Saturday, the campaign released a final ad in which Harris argued that Americans “have so much more in common than what separates them,” pledging: “We’re not falling for these folks who are trying to divide us.”

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McDaniel reported from Washington. Reston reported from Atlanta. Maegan Vazquez and Praveena Somasundaram contributed to this report.

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