Vice President Kamala Harris vowed to eliminate tip taxes during a campaign stop in Las Vegas on Saturday — prompting former President Donald Trump to criticize her for “copying” one of her signature proposals.
Although she spent much of her speech criticizing Trump, the Democratic presidential nominee regurgitated one of his signature ideas early in her campaign speech in the key state.
“I promise everyone here that when I am president, we will continue our fight for American working families, including raising the minimum wage and eliminating tip taxes for service and hospitality workers,” Harris told the crowd to thunderous applause.
Trump, who has been pushing the same idea since before Harris entered the race, immediately accused the former California prosecutor of pandering to the whims of the mob in Nevada, which has one of the highest concentrations of tipped workers in the country.
“Kamala Harris, whose “honeymoon” period is ending and starting to get hammered in the polls, just copied my NO TAX ON TIPS policy,” the Republican presidential candidate wrote on Truth Social.
“The difference is she won’t do it, she just wants it for political reasons! It was TRUMP’s idea – she has no idea, she can only steal from me.”
The former president first publicly unveiled the proposal at his own campaign stop in Nevada in June, before Harris replaced President Biden on the Democratic ticket.
Trump later said he was inspired to add the policy to his campaign after meeting a Nevada waiter who had lost a large portion of his tips to taxes.
Harris apparently refuted the idea that Trump would keep that promise – she accused him of only serving the wealthiest Americans.
“If elected, Donald Trump intends to give tax cuts to billionaires and corporations. He intends to slash Social Security and Medicare, and he intends to abandon our fight against the climate crisis,” Harris said.
His running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, echoed the same sentiment in his own speech: “[Trump will] “We need to manipulate the economy so that the middle class gets nothing and the rich get richer.”
While the idea of not taxing tips appealed to them, even Harris-Walz supporters admitted that the vice president copied her.
“That sounds like a good thing. I mean, that’s the same thing Trump said, right?” expert Tammy Campa, who earlier in her career was Bussey at Circus Circus, told the Post.
Others in the audience expressed more confidence in the vice president’s ability to keep his promise not to tax tips.
“He said it,” Varel Jackson, a local retiree, told the Post. “But you know, you can’t believe everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth.”
The Harris-Walz campaign estimated that 12,000 people attended Saturday’s event, even though the upper level of the arena was closed to attendees, leaving about 25 percent of it unoccupied.
The host stadium, the Thomas & Mack Center at the University of Nevada, can seat up to 19,500 people.
Campaign spokesmen said they had refused entry to another 4,000 people waiting in line to get in because they were becoming ill from enduring record 120-degree heat.
The visit marks the latest in a series of tours of the Democratic ticket to key states.
Last week, Harris and Walz traveled to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, then to Arizona and Nevada on Friday, five states that could be key to a victory in November. In 2020, President Biden narrowly beat Republican Donald Trump by 2.4 percentage points in Nevada.
The Las Vegas rally came just after the endorsement by the Culinary Union, Nevada’s largest union.
