The joy is over. As election nears, Kamala Harris tone goes dark

WASHINGTON — Gone is the joy. In it's place, rising alarm.

Vice President Kamala Harris has taken an increasingly fatalist approach to campaigning that centers on the threat she says former President Donald Trump would present to democracy if he returns to office.

"He's going to sit there unstable, unhinged, plotting his revenge, plotting his retribution, creating an enemies list," she said Wednesday evening during a town hall on CNN.

Harris referred to Trump as a "fascist" during the town hall, echoing comments made by his former chief of staff John Kelly in an interview this week, and hit him for reportedly praising aspects of Hitler's leadership, also according to Kelly.

Standing outside the vice president’s mansion at the Naval Observatory in Washington earlier in the day, Harris warned that Trump “is increasingly unhinged and unstable” and said “people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrail against his propensities and his actions" in a second term.

Over the past week, Harris has hammered Trump at most campaign events for comments he's made in the final days of the race about wielding the power of the presidency to muzzle dissenters and punish his political opponents.

That includes journalists, judges and non-partisan election officials, Harris argued at the CNN town hall.

“You can be sure, because he has said, he would weaponize the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies, that you can look at a Donald Trump in the White House after January 20, sitting in that Oval Office plotting his revenge. He has talked about the enemies within,” Harris said.

Trump has long framed independent journalists as the "enemy of the people" and last week suggested he'd use the U.S. military to contain possible post-election unrest from liberal protesters. He referred to Democrats as the "enemy within" in the same interview, a sentiment he later doubled down on.

“I always say, we have two enemies,” Trump said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News. “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”

At her recent rallies, Harris has begun playing a 30-second montage of Trump’s rhetoric. “Please roll the clip,,” she said at an event in Erie, Pennsylvania. A jumbotron flashed footage of Trump complaining about “the enemy from within” and suggesting his critics should be jailed or dealt with violently.

The crowd gasped and booed.

“He’s talking about the enemy within Pennsylvania,” Harris concluded. "He’s talking about that he considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country," she added.

She made a similar observation at a rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, last Thursday, warning that the Republican nominee “will stop at nothing to claim unchecked power for himself.”

In an appeal to Black voters, Harris urged congregants at a Black church in Atlanta on Monday to vote against “chaos, fear and hate.”

Harris has also taken a lighter approach at times, needling Trump for alleged exhaustion.

Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, also has sharpened his attack and has begun to hurl personal zingers at Trump.

After Trump handed out fries at a McDonald’s drive-through window in Pennsylvania, Walz mocked him from the stage in Madison, Wisconsin, as a “clown” who wears more makeup than Ronald McDonald. At the same rally, Walz made fun of billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump supporter, for “jumping around” on stage and “skipping like a dipshit.”

If her approach has taken a darker turn, Harris says, it's because Trump's conduct has made it necessary.

"He’s becoming increasingly unstable and unhinged, and it requires that response," she told reporters over the weekend. "I think the American people are seeing it, witnessing it in real time."

She said during an NBC interview on Friday that "one is not to the exclusion of the other," when it comes her joy campaign and rebuking Trump, and she continues to have a "great deal of optimism" about the future of the country.

"That is not in conflict with also being clear-eyed about the danger that Donald Trump poses, based on the language that he has used, and his admiration for dictators, his inability to really focus on the needs of the American people, in particular working people. These things are not in conflict, they all exist at the same time," she said.

To critics who say the joy is gone, she replied in the interview, "Oh, I'm having a great time."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kamala Harris let's the joy run out, campaigns with harsher tone