WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday criticized former President Donald Trump’s recent comments about reproductive rights, saying he needs to trust women to make their own decisions.

“I don’t think the women of America need him to say he’s going to protect them,” Harris said during an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, referring to previous comments from Trump. “The women of America need him to trust them.”

Trump said in an all-caps post to Truth Social last week that women “will no longer be thinking about abortion, because it is now where it always had to be, with the states.”

“I will protect women at a level never seen before,” he said. “They will finally be healthy, hopeful, safe, and secure.”

Asked if Americans can trust her on that front, Harris said “yes.”

“I am not perfect, but I will tell you I’m always going to put the needs of the people first,” she said.

Harris separately pointed to Trump’s previous comments suggesting women should be punished for having abortions.

“Donald Trump is also the person who said women should be punished for exercising a decision that they rightly should be able to make about their own body and their future,” Harris said. “So I think we would all agree that as a result of that perspective that he has about women, he also then chose three members of the United States Supreme Court who did as he intended, undid the protections of Roe v Wade.”

Harris was referring to comments Trump made in 2016 when he said that the “answer is that there has to be some form of punishment, yeah,” when asked about punishing women who broke a theoretical abortion ban.

Later, his campaign said that if abortion were made illegal, “the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Harris’ remarks in the interview.

Megan Lebowitz

Megan Lebowitz is a politics reporter for NBC News.

The race for the White House is neck-and-neck just six weeks from Election Day, with CNN‘s latest poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump tied among registered voters.

The survey, released by CNN and SSRS Opinion Panel on Tuesday, is based on the responses of 2,074 registered voters nationwide who were surveyed from September 19 to September 22. Harris and Trump were found tied in a multicandidate matchup at 47 percent, with Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver also on the ballot.

Tuesday’s poll also found that the candidates have relatively similar favorability ratings among voters. Forty-two percent of registered voters indicated that they hold a favorable view of the former president, while 45 percent said the same of Harris.

The core issues for voters, according to the latest survey results, are also reflective of similar polling in recent weeks. In the CNN poll, 41 percent of registered voters said that the economy was the most important issue in deciding their presidential pick, followed by protecting democracy (21 percent), immigration (12 percent) and abortion/reproductive rights (11 percent).

Recent analyses have indicated that the 2024 presidential election will likely be one of the closest races in American history. FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast model puts the race between Harris and Trump in the “toss-up” category, with the contest in four swing states—Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada—all falling within a 1-point margin as of Tuesday.

As FiveThirtyEight reporter G. Elliot Morris wrote in a report on Tuesday, there is a chance that November would see “the smallest electoral-vote margin in a presidential election since 1876.” CNN published an analysis piece on Sunday that found the 2024 race to be the “closest race for the White House in the past 60 years,” noting that neither candidate has been able to open up a 5-point lead or more across national polling.

“The fact that no one has led by at least 5 points this cycle is noteworthy because it’s incredibly rare,” CNN’s Harry Enten wrote in the report. “Even in races that end up being very close, one candidate at some point almost always builds a significant advantage. This year, most voters seem locked in.”

According to averages compiled by FiveThirtyEight, Harris is ahead across national polling by 2.5 percentage points (48.3 percent t 45.8 percent). At the same point in the 2020 election, President Joe Biden was up by 7.1 percentage points above Trump. Biden went on to beat the former president by 4.4 percentage points in November 2020.

RealClearPolling (RCP) shows the race to the White House even closer, with Harris leading Trump by 2.1 percentage points (49.2 percent to 47.1 percent). Per RCP’s estimates, the candidates are nearly tied in the Electoral College race: Harris had 215 electoral votes locked in while Trump had 219 votes secured.

RCP puts 104 electoral votes in the toss-up category, which includes those from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nebraska’s Second Congressional District.

Newsweek reached out to Harris and Trump’s campaigns via email for additional comment on Tuesday.