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What the candidates have said in the final week of the presidential race

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

The final week of campaigning has come and gone. Election Day is just days away. This past week, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump made their closing arguments, both before enormous crowds - Harris in Washington, D.C., Trump in New York City.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DONALD TRUMP: And I just want to say a very big hello to a special place, New York, and to an incredible arena, Madison Square Garden. Incredible.

RASCOE: Trump shared the stage Sunday night with a number of invited speakers.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

DAVID REM: She is the devil, whoever screamed that out. She is the Antichrist.

GRANT CARDONE: She's a fake, a fraud. She's a pretender. Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.

TONY HINCHCLIFFE: There's a lot going on. Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it's called Puerto Rico. OK.

RASCOE: And that last bit, from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, echoed throughout the week. But first to The Ellipse and the National Mall, where Harris spoke Tuesday.

(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: And the fact that someone disagrees with us does not make them the enemy within.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Right.

HARRIS: They are family, neighbors, classmates, co-workers. They are fellow Americans. And as Americans, we rise and fall together.

(CHEERING)

HARRIS: America, for too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust. And it can be easy then to forget a simple truth. It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way.

JOE BIDEN: Well, let me tell you something. I don't know the Puerto Rican that I know - or a Puerto Rico, where I'm - in my home state of Delaware. They're good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable.

TRUMP: I think that the comment made by really both of them because there are really two of them - about being garbage, maybe 250 million people - they shouldn't be talking. That's like deplorable for - this is the deplorable for Hillary.

HARRIS: Let me be clear. I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

TRUMP: They said, sir, I just think it's inappropriate for you to say, pay these guys a lot of money. Can you believe it? They said, well, I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. I'm going to protect them. I'm going to protect them from migrants coming in. I'm going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other...

HARRIS: And this is just the latest on a series of reveals by the former president of how he thinks about women and their agency. Whether he has said, as he has, that women should be punished for their choices...

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Former President Donald Trump is escalating his violent rhetoric, suggesting one of his most prominent critics, the former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, should be fired upon.

TRUMP: She's a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they're all warhawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Ayesha Rascoe is a White House correspondent for NPR. She is currently covering her third presidential administration. Rascoe's White House coverage has included a number of high profile foreign trips, including President Trump's 2019 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam, and President Obama's final NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland in 2016. As a part of the White House team, she's also a regular on the NPR Politics Podcast.
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