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The 2024 national election for the U.S. presidency is suddenly energized, with the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, and his likely Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, quickly casting each other in disparaging terms, trying to set the tone for the contest heading to the November 5 election.
After President Joe Biden, 81, dropped out of his reelection race Sunday under pressure from Democratic colleagues concerned about his frailty, mental acuity and falling poll numbers, the former president wasted no time in attacking Harris.
"Lyin' Kamala Harris destroys everything she touches!" he said on his Truth Social platform Tuesday. Earlier, he accused her of helping cover up Biden's condition.
"The Democrats lied and misled the public about Crooked Joe Biden, and now we find he is a complete and total Cognitive and Physical 'MESS,'" Trump said. "They also mislead [sic] the Republican Party, causing it to waste a great deal of time and money" on political advertising targeting a candidate, Biden, who is no longer Trump's opponent.
Harris, a former courtroom prosecutor in California, the country's most populous state, told a rally Tuesday that she knew the likes of Trump. In late May, he was convicted of 34 felonies linked to a 2016 hush money payment, just ahead of the election Trump won eight years ago, to a porn film star to silence her claim - denied by Trump - that she had a one-night tryst with him a decade earlier.
Harris said that as a prosecutor she'd taken on perpetrators of all kinds: "Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type."
Biden, as he ended his own campaign, while remaining as a lame-duck president for another six months, wholeheartedly endorsed Harris, his second-in-command for the past 3 1/2 years.
On Monday, he told Harris campaign workers via telephone, "The name has changed at the top of the ticket, but the mission hasn't changed at all. And by the way, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to be out there on the campaign with her, with Kamala."
"I've been honored and humbled - I mean this from the bottom of my heart, my word as a Biden - for all you've done for me and my family," he said, while adding that now, "I'm hoping you'll give every bit of your heart and soul that you gave to me to Kamala."
Biden said he would address the nation from the White House on Wednesday evening about his decision to withdraw from the presidential race and how he plans to govern during his remaining time in office. He is the first president since Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to withdraw from a reelection campaign.
While some Democratic officials initially thought Biden's withdrawal from his reelection effort might lead to a contested race among several contenders for the party's presidential nomination, leading Democratic state governors, the most likely presidential aspirants, quickly supported Harris' candidacy.
By late Monday, Harris had amassed more than enough delegates to the party's August 19-22 national convention in Chicago to unofficially claim the nomination, although the party is holding a virtual ballot that will decide the contest even earlier, by August 7.
Former House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, still an influential Democratic strategist, endorsed Harris, as did actor George Clooney, a major Democratic fundraiser in Hollywood who two weeks ago wrote an opinion article in The New York Times calling for Biden to end his candidacy, even though Clooney in June helped stage a glitzy fundraiser for him.
The top two Democratic congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, endorsed Harris on Tuesday.
Schumer said, "Boy, are we enthusiastic. It's a happy day. Democrats are moving forward more united than ever before" to support Harris.
The Harris campaign said it had raised more than $100 million from Sunday afternoon, when Biden ended his candidacy, through Monday evening.
Meanwhile, Harris is mulling whom to select as her vice-presidential running mate, with former Attorney General Eric Holder and Washington lawyer Dana Remus beginning to vet the backgrounds of several possible choices.
Among the names surfacing in news accounts were Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, a former U.S. astronaut; and six state governors, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Roy Cooper of North Carolina.
Harris headed Tuesday to Milwaukee, in the political battleground state of Wisconsin, for her first campaign rally as the likely Democratic nominee.
Trump, after securing the Republican presidential nomination last week, is resuming his campaign on Wednesday with a rally in the city of Charlotte, in North Carolina, another contested state. Trump won the state four years ago against Biden, even as he lost the national election.