Rallying supporters at her first event with her new running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris said she has taken on “perpetrators of all kinds” as a prosecutor, “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
The attack line, a signature of her nascent presidential campaign, immediately garnered chants of “Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!” from the crowd of 12,000 on Tuesday night in Philadelphia.
Harris swiftly interrupted rallygoers, saying “hold on, hold on,” and went on to declare that her campaign with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was “not just a fight against Donald Trump,” but a “fight for the future.” The chants broke out again, when Walz told the crowd “violent crime was up under Donald Trump — and that’s not even counting the crimes he committed.” Walz then began to talk over the crowd and motioned with his hands to quiet down.
The next day, at a rally in Eau Claire, Wis., at least one attendee was heard yelling again: “Lock him up!” Harris responded: “We’re gonna let the courts handle that. Our job is to beat him in November.” She reiterated that statement, when a “lock him up” chant began at a rally in Michigan later that day.
Harris and Walz’s efforts to defuse the “lock him up” chant highlight the careful line Democrats must navigate as they run against Trump, the first former president convicted of a crime. Harris has emphasized her background as a prosecutor and her allies have embraced the prosecutor-versus-felon matchup.
Yet Democrats have also approached Trump’s criminal cases with caution, wanting to remind voters of his conviction while also avoiding politicizing his legal cases.
The former president has leaned into his court cases by portraying himself as the victim of a weaponized judicial system and has claimed without evidence that the cases against him are coordinated with the White House. A special counsel acting independently of the White House brought the two federal cases against Trump. Local authorities brought two of the cases against him with no evidence they coordinated.
In May, Trump was convicted by a New York jury of 34 charges connected to a 2016 hush money payment to an adult-film star. A judge has set Trump’s sentencing date for Sept. 18. He faces charges in two other cases — a federal case in which he’s charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results and a state case in Georgia, where he’s charged with allegedly trying to undo the 2020 election results in the state. In a fourth case, a federal judge in Florida last month dismissed charges of mishandling classified documents. Trump has denied all wrongdoing.
Democrats also want to avoid encouraging their supporters to mimic the “lock her up” chants that Trump’s supporters used in 2016 when he was running against Hillary Clinton. Those chants were suggesting Clinton should be imprisoned over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Clinton was not charged with a crime.
Unlike Harris and Walz, Trump welcomed those chants during his 2016 rallies, and in several occasions explicitly said that Clinton should “go to jail.” At a 2016 rally in Greensboro, N.C. he said: “For what she’s done, they should lock her up, she’s disgraceful.”
During Trump’s presidency, his Department of Justice did not pursue prosecutorial action against Clinton. At a 2020 rally in Arizona, Trump’s supporters also chanted “lock him up” as Trump attacked Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
At Harris’s rallies this week, “Lock him up” has not been the dominant chant. “Not going back,” for example, has been far more frequent. In Eau Claire, the crowd also chanted: “This is what democracy looks like” as they waited for Harris and Walz to come onto the stage. At a Biden rally last month, before dropping his reelection bid, the president’s supporters chanted, “Lock him up” — which Biden did not discourage.
Asked for comment about the chants, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, echoed the former president’s baseless claims, saying, “These chants would be funny if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden had not literally weaponized the justice system against President Trump in an attempt to imprison him ahead of the election because they cannot beat him on the issues.”
The Harris campaign, meanwhile, didn’t address the chants, in response to a request for comment.
“This election is a choice between two visions: Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who are fighting for our future, our freedoms and to protect democracy and the rule of law, and the Trump-Vance Project 2025 agenda to rip away our freedoms, dismantle democracy when it doesn’t serve them, and spread hatred, chaos and division,” said Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika. “The contrast could not be more clear.”
Dylan Wells and Sabrina Rodriguez contributed to this report.