Vice President Kamala Harris announced her pledge to repeal the tip tax while campaigning in Las Vegas on Saturday, prompting former President Donald Trump to slam her for “copying” one of his signature proposals.
The Democratic presidential nominee spent much of his speech sharply criticizing Trump, but opened his speech in a battleground state by repeating one of Trump’s signature lines.
“I promise all of you here that if I’m president, I’ll continue to fight for working American families, including raising the minimum wage and eliminating the tip tax for service and hospitality workers,” Harris told the crowd, drawing thunderous applause.
Trump, who has championed the same views since before Harris entered the race, was quick to accuse the former California prosecutor of pandering to the mob in Nevada, which has the largest concentration of tipped workers in the country.
“Kamala Harris, whose ‘honeymoon’ period is over and she’s beginning to lose ground in the polls, has simply copied my no-tip tax policy,” the Republican presidential candidate said. wrote Truth Social.
“The difference is, she’s not going to do it. She just wants it for political purposes! This was Trump’s idea. She has no ideas, she can only steal them from me.”
The former president first made the proposal public during his own campaign rally in Nevada in June, before Harris replaced President Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Trump later said he was inspired to add the policy to his campaign after meeting with a Nevada waiter who lost a large portion of his tips to taxes.
Harris appeared to reject the idea that Trump would keep that promise, accusing him of serving only the wealthiest Americans.
“If elected, Donald Trump will give tax cuts to billionaires and big corporations. He will cut Social Security and Medicare. And he will abandon the fight against the climate crisis,” Harris said.
Her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, echoed similar sentiments in his speech.[Trump will] They manipulate the economy so that the middle class gets nothing and the rich get richer.”
The Harris-Waltz faction liked the no-tip-tax idea, but acknowledged that the vice president copied it.
“That sounds like a good thing. I mean, it’s the same thing that Trump said, right?,” Tammy Kampa, an appraiser who worked as a waiter at Circus Circus early in her career, told The Washington Post.
Some in the audience expressed confidence that the vice president would follow through on his promise to repeal the tip tax.
“That’s what he said,” local retiree Varel Jackson told The Washington Post, “but you can’t believe everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth.”
Harris-Waltz’s campaign estimated that 12,000 people attended Saturday’s event, despite the top floor of the arena being closed to the public, meaning 25% of the stadium was not filled.
The host stadium, the University of Nevada’s Thomas & Mack Center, can accommodate a maximum of 19,500 people.
A campaign spokesman said a further 4,000 people waiting in line to get in were turned away because they had become ill while enduring record-breaking 120-degree heat.
The visit marks the final stop in a series of visits to battleground states by the Democratic candidate.
Ms Harris and Mr Walz visited Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan last week, followed by visits on Friday to Arizona and Nevada – five states that could be crucial to victory in November.
In 2020, President Biden defeated Republican President Donald Trump in Nevada by just 2.4 percentage points.
The Las Vegas rally was held with the support of Nevada’s largest labor union, the Culinary Union.
