Starring in Kamala Harris’s Closing Argument: Donald Trump

With the presidential race a dead heat two weeks before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris is moving aggressively to make sure voters in the battlegrounds remember precisely why they rejected Donald J. Trump four years ago.

Gone is the euphoria of her joyful first weeks as the Democratic presidential nominee. She is no longer trying simply to diminish the former president. Now, he looms large. Literally.

“See for yourself,” she told a crowd in Ashwaubenon, Wis., on Thursday, gesturing to two large television screens installed at the rally. “Let’s roll a clip.”

The video screens lit up with a 40-second montage of Mr. Trump bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade.

As Ms. Harris stood watching like a late-night host observing the audience’s reaction, the crowd booed and then began a chant of “Lock him up.” She gently stopped them before returning to her promises to restore and protect abortion rights.

Deploying his words as her sharpest weapons, Ms. Harris is pointing to Mr. Trump’s erratic behavior and increasingly outlandish and antidemocratic statements to paint him as unfit, unstable and, above all, too dangerous for another term. It is a closing argument she is hoping will persuade the dwindling number of undecided voters to help her defeat him.

“I do believe that Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Friday. “And the consequences of him ever getting back into the White House are brutally serious.”

Ms. Harris’s increasingly pointed attacks on the former president are landing as she struggles to overtake his advantage on the economy, the issue that voters are mostly likely to prioritize. They have been paired with her campaign’s methodical outreach to key constituencies that Democrats believe are repelled by Mr. Trump’s polarizing style and divisive rhetoric.

She plans to spend the coming days wooing suburban women and moderates with a series of events featuring former Representative Liz Cheney, the highest-profile Republican to endorse her candidacy. Last week, she sought to connect with Black male voters through a series of policy rollouts and interviews, as part of an effort to remind some previously Democratic supporters why they rejected Mr. Trump before.

The strategy represents a return to President Biden’s original tack of amplifying Mr. Trump in order to force the contest into a referendum not on his administration, but the former president’s words and deeds. It’s a blueprint that helped drive big Democratic victories in 2018, 2020 and 2022. And his recent run of undisciplined behavior has given Ms. Harris ample material to highlight.

But it comes with a risk. Voters now view Mr. Trump slightly more favorably than they did when he left office, and surveys indicate that he is making inroads with new voters, including Black and Latino men, groups that could potentially be decisive on Election Day. His campaign has worked hard to project the impression that Mr. Trump is marching to an inevitable victory — even though nearly all available polling shows the race to be a dead heat — as it tries to push infrequent voters to the polls.

Mr. Trump’s allies say his approach, a swaggering romp through purple and blue states alike that will take him to Madison Square Garden next week, is going to work — even if they can’t quite say how or why.

“It’s like dealing with a giraffe or a panda; you can’t explain him in normal terms,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican. He added, “I think Trump has reason to believe that the strategy’s working.”

But Mr. Trump has been delivering winding speeches that have alarmed some allies, and he has doubled down on politically toxic threats to his opponents and a dark, apocalyptic message that helps to illustrate Ms. Harris’s point. Mr. Trump started the week with a town hall where he spent 39 minutes swaying silently onstage to his favorite songs, as if the evening’s planned activity, answering voters’ questions, was no longer necessary. And he finished it in Pennsylvania on Saturday with a lewd joke about a famous golfer’s genitals, while also using vulgarity to refer to Ms. Harris.

Over the course of the past six days, Ms. Harris has unleashed a barrage of attacks aimed at making Mr. Trump as unpalatable as possible. Her campaign is blanketing the airwaves with negative ads — the ad for Ms. Harris featured most in Nevada over the past week, for example, is a 30-second spot in which two of Mr. Trump’s former advisers describe him as “unstable,” according to the tracking firm AdImpact — but she is making the pitch in every forum she can find.

On Monday, her campaign debuted a new video montage at her rallies featuring footage of Mr. Trump threatening to dispatch the military against liberals who oppose him and calling them the “enemy within.” The next day, she agreed with an interviewer who described Mr. Trump’s vision as fascism: “Yes, we can say that,” she told the radio host Charlamagne Tha God.

In Michigan, she questioned Mr. Trump’s stamina, citing reports that he was “exhausted” by the campaign trail. At campaign events in Wisconsin, she attacked him for comments describing the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol as a “day of love.”

In between, she took the fight directly onto the former president’s terrain, using an appearance on Fox News to cast him as “unfit” before a conservative audience unaccustomed to hearing such criticism.

“The American people have a concern about Donald Trump, which is why the people who know him best, including leaders of our national security community, have all spoken out,” she said on Fox News on Thursday. “Even people who worked for him in the Oval Office, worked with him in the Situation Room, and have said he is unfit and dangerous and should never be president of the United States again.”

The shift in strategy reflects the apparent belief that, in a neck-and-neck sprint to the finish line, the best way to squeeze out every vote is to frame the race as a choice between Ms. Harris and an unacceptable opponent.

“If you’re going to win a close race, you do so on the margins,” said Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground states director, of the seven battleground states. He added: “We felt pretty confident that they would all be close. And sure enough, here we are.”

Mr. Trump’s team has been telegraphing a more confident message. When John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster close to Mr. Trump, was asked about the seven swing states in an interview with Puck News this week, he declared, “We’re probably going to win all of them.”

Perhaps as a result, Mr. Trump has appeared less interested in tailoring a message to anybody who isn’t already a die-hard supporter. He is trailing Ms. Harris with female voters, but when he appeared on Fox News for a town-hall-style event with women last week, the audience was stocked with women who already supported him. He still made headlines for seeming out of touch, like when he called himself the “father of I.V.F.,” handing Ms. Harris another opportunity to pounce.

“I mean what does that even mean?” Ms. Harris asked during a rally in Green Bay, Wis., on Thursday.

On Tuesday, he said Black and Latino voters who don’t support him must have something wrong with them in an echo of his frequent insult that Jewish voters who vote for Democrats should “have to have their head examined.” In an appearance on “Fox & Friends” Friday morning, he spoke dismissively about Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, whose supporters largely included the moderate Republican women Harris will be courting this week.

On Friday night in Michigan, he told supporters to “get your fat husband off the couch, get that fat pig off the couch” and “vote for Trump.”

Mr. Trump’s allies and advisers have repeatedly urged him to stick to the issues that they believe will carry him to victory: the economy, inflation and immigration. They have grown concerned that by weaving meandering tributaries into his speeches and lobbing personal attacks on Ms. Harris, he could damage his standing with female voters.

The rallies in blue states are in part meant to keep the boss happy. Mr. Trump has throughout his campaign pushed for a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, and the long-sought event has been scheduled for later next week.

“This is an iconic place, and he just wants to do it,” Mr. Gingrich said. “He does things he likes doing.”

He has urged his allies to go even easier on him. During the appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Friday, he complained that the network was airing negative ads about him.

“For 19 days, I don’t think we should do that anymore,” he said. “I think you shouldn’t play negative ads.”

Yet, at least part of Mr. Trump’s incautious approach could be intended to project his sense of electoral strength. He has been priming his supporters to doubt anything but a sweeping victory, and his events in liberal cities are meant to bolster his contention that he remains more competitive in solidly blue states than pollsters have suggested.

For Mr. Trump, the stakes reach beyond the next election: The former president is running not only for the White House but also to remain a free man. Should he lose, he may very well face jail time.

With views of Mr. Trump largely cemented, the burden is on Ms. Harris to prove herself to undecided voters, according to some Republicans.

“Trump’s going to do what Trump’s going to do, but the question is, what is Kamala Harris doing differently that’s unique, that’s forward thinking and that’s a big ‘aha’ moment that gives swing voters in Georgia and across the country permission to vote for her?” said Stephen Lawson, a Republican strategist in Georgia.

Ms. Harris, who often calls herself the underdog, has been predicting that she will draw in just enough of them.

“Make no mistake,” she said on Friday in Michigan, “we will win.”

Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Ashwaubenon, Wis., and Benjamin Oreskes contributed reporting from Las Vegas.