HARRIS, TRUMP, AND TWO PENNSYLVANIA TOWN HALLS. MALVERN, Pennsylvania — Vice President Kamala Harris held a town hall-style event here in southeastern Pennsylvania Monday afternoon. It featured former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, perhaps Harris’s highest-profile GOP supporter. The night before, former President Donald Trump held a town hall of his own in Lancaster, about an hour away. The two gatherings might as well have been in different universes. 

The Harris town hall was billed as an event in which the two women would “warn about the risk of a second Trump term for America and lay out the vice president’s agenda for a New Way Forward for the American people.” What that meant in practice was that it was tightly focused on suburban women in Chester County, a suburb of Philadelphia that President Joe Biden won by 17 points but that might be closer this time around. Even though Cheney is best known for pursuing Trump through the House Jan. 6 committee and has based her anti-Trump activism largely on what she says is the threat Trump poses to American democracy, the event wasn’t really about that. Instead, it was centered on two “predetermined” questions from the audience that addressed concerns about family, healthcare, children, and abortion.