Harris, Trump goes toe-to-toe in crazy final campaign weekend

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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump enter the final weekend of the most tense US presidential campaign in modern times with a flurry of swing-state rallies that will test their stamina – and ability to persuade the nation’s last undecided voters.

Harris, who is bidding to become the country’s first female president, will use rallies in Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan to push her message that Trump is a threat to American democracy.

Trump – who is seeking a sensational return to the White House after losing in 2020 and then becoming the first presidential candidate to be convicted of crimes – is promising a radical right-wing makeover of government and aggressive trade wars to advance his “America First” policy .”

The 78-year-old, who met in Milwaukee, Wisconsin late Friday, just miles from Harris’ event there, will almost cross paths with her again as Trump makes whistle stops in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Their hectic schedule runs right into Monday, culminating in evening rallies — in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Trump and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for Harris.

Election Day is Tuesday, but Americans have been voting early for weeks, with more than 70 million ballots already cast — including a record four million in Georgia, where Democrats are looking to pull out all the stops to keep the state in their favor.

Polls continue to show a tied race, particularly in the seven battleground states that are likely to decide the outcome in the US Electoral College system, leaving the Republican businessman and his 60-year-old Democratic rival scrambling to peel even a sliver of support from each other camps.

Harris, who is currently President Joe Biden’s vice president, is doing so by appealing to centrist voters and driving his base to the polls with a robust game and get out of the vote effort.

And by painting Trump as a toxic authoritarian, she’s also urging voters to “finally turn the page” on the former president.

“He is someone who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed by grievances — and the man is after unchecked power,” she told supporters in Little Chute, Wisconsin.

Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on his already extreme rhetoric, hoping to fire up his loyal base to turn out in massive numbers.

“Kamala’s final message to America is that she hates you,” Trump said Friday night in Warren, Michigan, where he slammed the economy under Biden and Harris as a disaster — which economists say it clearly isn’t — and warned that that “a 1929-style economic depression” would follow if Harris was elected.

Citing her hawkish foreign policy views, Trump had previously conjured up the image of former Republican representative-turned-Harris supporter Liz Cheney being shot.

“She’s a radical warhawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, with the guns trained on her face,” Trump said.

Despite the rhetoric, Trump waxed nostalgic on Friday about how his experience with the campaign over the past nine years has been “the thrill of a lifetime.”

“And now we’re going to take that excitement and turn it into ‘let’s do business,’ right?”

Harris, the nation’s first black and first Asian-American vice president, has meanwhile sought to leverage celebrity star power such as Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen in the campaign’s waning days.

Jennifer Lopez, a pop icon of Puerto Rican heritage, joined Harris on stage Thursday, amid a firestorm sparked by a Trump rally warm-up speaker who branded the US territory a “floating island of trash.”

Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B appeared alongside the candidate Friday night, asking the crowd in Milwaukee, “Are we ready to make history?”

With the election just days away – and Trump refusing to say whether he will accept its results if he loses – businesses in the capital Washington have begun boarding up storefronts as city officials warn of a “fluid, unpredictable security environment” for days after the polls close.

Trump is already alleging fraud and cheating in swing states like Pennsylvania, setting the stage for what many fear will be more unrest after the violence that erupted in the US capital in the wake of the 2020 vote.