Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday slammed former President Donald J. Trump for calling Jan. 6, 2021, the day his supporters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, a “day of love.”
Speaking in La Crosse, Wis., Ms. Harris said her Republican opponent was “gaslighting” Americans with his effort to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 as a mostly peaceful day. He has falsely argued that the violence was instigated not by his supporters but by forces opposed to him.
“We here know Jan. 6 was a tragic day, it was a day of terrible violence,” Ms. Harris told a crowd organizers estimated at about 3,000 at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse campus gymnasium. “He called it, quote, a day of love. But it points out something that everyone here knows. The American people are exhausted with his gaslighting. Exhausted with his gaslighting. Enough. We are ready to turn the page.”
Mr. Trump had been pressed on Wednesday by a voter during a town-hall event broadcast on Univision to explain why he should earn back the trust of Americans who grew disillusioned with him because of his actions, including on Jan. 6.
“That was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions,” Mr. Trump said. “It could have been the largest group I’ve ever spoken before. They asked me to speak and I went and I spoke.”
The mob attack on Jan. 6 in fact injured roughly 150 law enforcement officers and led to the deaths of several others.
The La Crosse rally was the second of three planned campaign stops on Thursday in Wisconsin for Ms. Harris, in which she otherwise focused on an economic pitch.
She was joined earlier in Milwaukee and then in La Crosse by Mark Cuban, the celebrity tech billionaire who has owned a professional basketball team and hosted a reality television show.
Mr. Cuban, who appeared to be reading his remarks from his phone in La Crosse, said Mr. Trump was speaking “gibberish” about tariffs and suggested the former president was confused about his own proposals.
“Back in the ’90s and early 2000s, he was a little bit coherent when he talked about trade policies,” Mr. Cuban told the crowd. “The way he talks about trade policy, something is a little bit lost.”
Mr. Cuban, who last year endorsed Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary race before backing Ms. Harris, subsequently explained that tariffs would increase prices on an array of goods. He then described Mr. Trump as “the Grinch that wants to steal your Christmas.”
Ms. Harris’s trip, which began with a stop with Mr. Cuban at a business class at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was set to conclude on Thursday evening with a rally in Ashwaubenon in the shadow of Lambeau Field, home to the locally beloved Green Bay Packers.
It was Ms. Harris’s sixth trip to the state since she replaced President Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee this summer. The three stops on Thursday represented an increase in her campaign’s typical daily velocity, and signaled an urgency to reach as many voters as possible in the final weeks before Election Day.
Polling in Wisconsin, like other battleground states, shows a neck-and-neck race. Ms. Harris had an advantage of four percentage points in the most recent poll from Marquette University Law School, one of the most reputable surveys of the state, though most other polls have shown her and Mr. Trump within one or two points of each other.
Before Ms. Harris began her first planned event of the day at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, news broke that Israel had killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader seen as the architect of last year’s Oct. 7 attack that killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel.
Ms. Harris broke from her planned schedule and delivered brief remarks, noting Mr. Sinwar’s death and calling for an end to the war in Gaza.
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