Confrontation between Harris and Trump: vice president keeps his distance from Biden in the final stretch

President Biden returns to the campaign trail this weekend with stops in the largest of the battleground states, his native Pennsylvania.

The White House confirmed that the president will campaign on his behalf Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats downvoting when he stops Friday in Philadelphia and Saturday in Scranton, where the 81-year-old Biden was born and spent his early childhood.

But Harris, who is still locked in a tight showdown with former President Trump with four days until Election Day in the race to succeed Biden in the White House, will not join her boss on the campaign trail.

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The vice president has distanced herself from Biden, who polls show remains deeply unpopular with Americans, and her campaign quietly views him as a liability. And that was before the president made two egregious comments in the past two weeks that quickly went viral.

While Harris has noted the policy successes of the Biden/Harris administration over the past four years during her campaign, she is emphasized that she will be an agent of change in the the White House.

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During her closing address Tuesday evening at the Ellipse, just yards from the White House, where the president huddled, Harris emphasized, “I am honored to serve as Joe Biden’s vice president, but I will bring my own experiences and ideas to bring the conference. Oval office.”

It’s been almost two months since the former running mates campaigned together. You have to go back to Labor Day, when they joined forces at a union event in Pittsburgh.

Biden, 81, was replaced by Harris atop Democrats’ 2024 ticket in July after ending his own bid amid a growing chorus of calls for him to resign following a disastrous debate performance. against Trump. Biden told reporters two months ago that he would be “on the road from then on” campaigning on behalf of his vice president.

It didn’t happen.

And while former Democratic presidents Obama and Clinton have traversed the campaign trail on Harris’ behalf in recent weeks, Biden’s efforts are more limited and less well-known.

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While Biden has not done many campaign events, he has made official trips with political overtones to some of the seven key battleground states whose razor-thin margins determined his 2020 victory over Trump and will likely determine whether Harris or Trump wins the 2024 election . .

The President highlighted the government’s achievements during those events.

“I think they’re using it in a targeted, meaningful way,” a political adviser close to the president told Fox News.

Last week, Biden teamed up with progressive champion Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont at a policy event in the swing state of New Hampshire to highlight their efforts to lower health care costs.

The two octogenarians touted a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services showing that nearly 1.5 million Medicare enrollees saved nearly $1 billion on prescription drugs in the first half of the year.

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But minutes later, Biden sparked controversy at a political event.

Speaking to supporters at the New Hampshire Democratic Party headquarters in Concord, N.H., Biden said of Trump: “We have to lock him up.”

While the president immediately corrected himself and added to “lock him up politically,” the damage had already been done.

The first comment immediately gave Trump ammunition for his argument that the four charges against him — and one conviction — are part of an elaborate Democratic Party witch hunt. That’s despite the fact that there is no evidence that the president or his administration played any role in Trump’s prosecutions and despite Trump’s repeated calls over the years to jail his own political opponents.

Biden dug an even deeper hole Tuesday night, overriding the vice president’s closing speech with more controversial comments during a video call with Latino supporters.

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Biden denounced racist comments from a comedian at Sunday’s Trump rally in New York City, which had dominated news coverage for several days, and appeared to call the former president’s supporters “crap.”

Biden tried to clear up the mess, saying he was referring to the Trump rally comedian’s “hateful rhetoric” and not the former president’s supporters in general.

But Trump’s campaign and its allies struck immediately, and Biden’s comments dominated the news cycle for two straight days.

Harris on Wednesday morning rejected any idea of ​​discrediting Trump supporters.

Noting that Biden had “clarified his comments,” she added, “Let me be clear: I strongly disagree with criticizing people based on who they vote for.”

Even before the Biden comments, Harris was walking the tightrope faced by previous vice presidents running for the top job. He tried to strike a balance between supporting the boss and advertising the government’s achievements, while also pushing a forward-looking message and showing how they had done it. be different.

“This election is about Kamala Harris, so people need to see the vision she has for America. … It’s important that the focus remains on her,” Jim Demers, a veteran New Hampshire resident, Harris’ Democratic strategist and congressional delegate told Fox News.

But Demers, who is also a longtime Biden supporter and surrogate, noted that “you’re not going to stop Joe Biden from participating in the campaign, and in the last few days it’s good to see him urging people to vote for Kamala Harris.”

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more on our Fox News Digital election hub.