Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have adopted a smart strategy for handling her followers’ (rather ironic) calls for Donald Trump to be incarcerated.
At Harris’ rallies, her supporters have occasionally broken out into chants of “lock him up” when she references the various criminal proceedings against the former president. The chant seems to combine the irony of using the phrase popularized at Trump's rallies against the candidate who pushed false claims of criminality against Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, together with an expression of a very real desire to see Trump held accountable for his actions.
But you may have noticed that Harris, a former prosecutor, has never encouraged the chant. Instead, she’s waited for it to die down before going on with her speech.
I suspect she’s done this primarily out of respect for the administration of justice. Even if she does happen to want to see Trump get prison time as a result of being found guilty on 34 felony counts, it wouldn’t be smart — politically or legally — for her to say so. And I suspect she doesn’t want her followers to appear as rabid as Trump’s, despite their conviction that he should go to prison over his criminal conviction.
So I’ve been impressed with how she's responded to these chants by reiterating that her campaign is about more than defeating Trump. “This campaign — our campaign — is not just a fight against Donald Trump,” she said at her rally in Philadelphia this week. “Our campaign — this campaign — is a fight for the future.”
Harris put a different twist on that message when the “lock him up” chants broke out during her stump speeches in Wisconsin and Detroit on Wednesday, saying in both speeches, “The courts are going to handle that” and “We’re going to beat him in November.”
It’s a clever play, really. It places Harris above the fray but doesn’t diminish her followers’ energy. And it speaks to voters who may want something to motivate them this November other than accountability for Trump and his illiberalism.