The Trump campaign makes a late push to paint Harris as ‘anti-Christian’

At his weekend rally in LaTrobe, Penn., Trump said that Harris had delivered “an insult to Catholics” by skipping the Al Smith dinner and sending a comic sketch of herself with comedian Molly Shannon, who acted out the Catholic school girl character she developed on “Saturday Night Live.” (Some in the audience booed after the video was played.)

Harris went further, said Trump, “where she said, ‘you’re in the wrong location,’ when they started talking about a certain subject, which basically was a knock on Christianity and a knock on religion.”

JD Vance picked up the theme at his own stops. At a Sunday rally in Waukesha, billed as a response to Harris “as she continues to spit in the face of Catholic voters,” Vance accused the campaign of embracing “anti-Christian rhetoric.” A shout of “Jesus is King!” came from the crowd.“That’s right,” said Vance. “Jesus is King.”

The campaign had been working on this line for months, before Vance was on the ticket or Harris led hers. Seven months ago, Trump’s team condemned Joe Biden for recognizing the Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31, which happened to overlap with Easter Sunday that year, calling for “an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians” who had been disrespected. (Harris also recognized the transgender holiday.)

Once he linked up with Trump, Vance, a Catholic convert, had attacked the Democrats over California’s lawsuit against a Catholic hospital that declined to perform emergency abortions, and over Gov. Gretchen Whitmer feeding a Doritos chip to a liberal influencer — an adaptation of a TikTok trend that Vance and others called a parody of Holy Communion.

“Think about how sacrilegious that is, and think about how offensive that is, frankly,” Vance said in Waukesha. “When you see a surrogate of Kamala Harris insulting people of the Christian faith, you should say to every one of those people: You’re fired. We’re going to respect Christians.” Days earlier, Whitmer had apologized for the video after a group of Catholic bishops denounced it, saying that the gag was not intended as a religious parody.

Republicans hope to make gains with Catholic voters this year, after Joe Biden – just the second Catholic president — narrowly won them in 2020. According to polling by the Pew Research Center, most Catholics support some form of legal abortion, putting them more in line with Harris, and non-white Catholics tilt significantly towards the Democratic ticket.

The aftermath of the La Crosse protest — the Fox News interview in which the students said they had been attacked for their religiosity — was one of those stories that got little traction in traditional media but blew up on social media.

It wasn’t at all clear that Harris, onstage, could hear exactly what the students were saying. At the risk of being obvious: Rallies are loud. (I was at the Harris-Walz speech in Michigan where Gaza protesters interrupted her, and while Harris could hear them, from my seat in the media row I heard indistinct shouting.)

But the two students claimed that Harris knew what she was responding to and gave them an “evil smirk.” Beth claimed that she could see him take a cross off his neck and wave it in the air. This is what conservative media consumers saw over the past few days, boosted by everyone from Charlie Kirk to Elon Musk. It fit into a story told by the Trump campaign for months, sometimes rebutted by Democrats, sometimes ignored.

The Harris campaign tries to control the news cycle. The Trump campaign embraces chaotic events to work its major themes. And the coverage of that doesn’t get to every voter.

Denise Murphy McGraw, the national co-chair of Catholics Vote Common Good, had organized for Biden in 2020, and is now part of a “kitchen cabinet” that advises the Harris campaign. Republicans, she said, were trying to exploit any incident they could to faint a false picture of the nominee.

“I was pleased that she did the video for the Al Smith dinner, that she didn’t pretend it wasn’t happening,” said McGraw. “They are very tuned in to the Catholic vote.” She had seen criticism of how Harris handled the La Crosse protest, she said, but “it’s so hard for me to judge this one statement made versus the thousands of bizarre statements by Donald Trump.”

The pro-Harris Catholic campaign, said McGraw, was reaching out to voters and highlighting the Democrat’s social justice policies. “I hear every day from people who don’t like her,” she said. “I get folks who tell me she’s a whore, whether they got a postcard, they saw a billboard — they want that opinion known. But quite frankly, I hear from people each day who say she better reflects their social justice teaching than Trump does.”