Trump skewered Clinton as too focused on herself. Now Harris is flipping that attack on him.

by Alexander Burns
08/22/2024

When Donald Trump addressed the Republican convention in 2016, he picked up one of Hillary Clinton’s signature slogans and wielded it against her to searing effect. Clinton’s campaign, he noted, had a catch phrase that he called a “three-world loyalty pledge.”

“It reads, ‘I’m With Her,’” Trump intoned. “I choose to recite a different pledge. My pledge reads: ‘I’m with you.’”

It was an unusually deft rhetorical turn that mocked Clinton’s self-hyping campaign and encouraged many voters’ suspicions that she was not truly focused on them.

Fast forward eight years and Kamala Harris delivered the counter-argument that Clinton and Joe Biden never really managed to land.

Narrating her career as a lawyer, Harris told the Democratic convention in Chicago that she has “only had one client: the people.” In Trump’s career in business and politics, she went on, he has represented “the only client he has ever had: himself.”

It extends a theme we’ve heard throughout the Democratic convention: that Trump is a narcissist who’s not really interested in governing, leading or helping people. It is an ironic turn that among the most effective versions of that message came from Bill Clinton, when he urged voters listening to Trump: “Don’t count the lies, count the I’s.”