Trump campaign shifts strategy and goes on the attack against Kamala Harris

On the Sunday after the June 27 presidential debate, Donald Trump’s top advisers went to bed hoping that Democratic concern about President Joe Biden’s performance would cool and give way to a new round of headlines at the start of the new week.

But when they woke up the next morning to the intensifying Democratic calamity, they began plotting the extraordinary potential scenario of Biden stepping aside.

Behind the scenes, between preparing for a convention and an assassination attempt that would rock the country, they also surveyed the field of potential Democratic candidates, questioned Trump against a possible replacement and began launching more soft attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, believing she was the most likely heir to the nomination.

Now, with Biden announcing he will not run for reelection, the seeds of that work are already in place. Just hours after Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice president on Sunday (21), Trump’s campaign managers released a scathing statement tying Harris to the administration’s policies. Meanwhile, a campaign-fundraising group aligned with Trump’s policies has run ads in some swing states trying to paint Harris as someone who enabled Biden when he was clearly in a weakened position.

Trump also worked quickly to gain an advantage over whoever his next opponent was, suggesting that the next debate be moved from liberal-leaning ABC to the more Republican-friendly Fox News studios.

Biden, Trump wrote on social media, “was not fit to run for President and is certainly not fit to serve – and never has been!”

The Trump campaign’s three-week scramble to prepare for the unprecedented may have started as a contingency, but it has now become an urgent necessity. Throughout the past year, Trump has maintained that he did not expect Biden’s candidacy to last until November. Yet neither he nor his campaign has taken serious steps to prepare for that outcome.

Instead, Trump’s team has orchestrated a demanding campaign to defeat Biden. Millions of dollars have already been spent on models to predict outcomes in key battlegrounds, deploying a sophisticated data operation and preparing an advertising campaign to contrast the two candidates. It is a campaign built around the assumption that Trump would face an 81-year-old man whose physical and mental state has become enough of a negative to make enough voters overlook the Republican candidate’s many flaws.

Now, much of that work will be thrown out, or at least reimagined, for a race that has been completely changed by recent events. Whether Democrats choose Harris or someone else, Trump, the oldest major-party candidate in history, becomes the candidate whose age worries some voters.

“The real value (Harris) brings is simply that Democrats don’t have to worry about whether their nominee will meet the minimum threshold of suitability for office,” said a Republican strategist who asked not to be identified to speak freely. “That means this will be a real campaign.”

Ready-made attack ads

For a while, Republicans watched blithely as chaos unfolded on the Democratic side, and Trump sat quietly for a few weeks as Biden fumbled through the fallout. But it quickly became widely recognized in the Trump camp that Biden’s exit would throw his own campaign into uncertainty as well.

As calls for Biden to resign reached a crescendo in early July, the Trump campaign began researching the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws to understand the internal processes that would occur if Biden were to step aside, according to a senior Trump campaign official.

The Republican team also began testing new lines of attack on Harris — someone it had largely ignored since she was sworn in as vice president. That included sprinkling new criticisms of the California Democrat into Trump’s speeches and encouraging the former president’s surrogates to do the same, according to two senior Trump advisers.

Some of those new attacks were on display at the Republican National Convention last week, where Harris was easily the second most criticized Democrat on stage, behind Biden.

Now that the time has come, Trump’s team is planning a series of negative ads against Harris’s record, not only under the Biden administration but also during her time as a prosecutor and attorney general in California, a source told CNN . The message will come from both the campaign and at least one group of supporters aligned with the former president.

While polls have shown Harris to be the best-known of the potential Democratic candidates to replace Biden, Trump’s advisers and allies say most Americans do not know much about her, creating an opening to define her in public.

The leading pro-Trump fundraising group, MAGA Inc., released a new 30-second commercial on Sunday, first shared on social media, previewing the plan of attack. The ad accused Harris of “covering up Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline.” And it featured clips of Harris praising Biden’s performance as president, saying, “Our president is fit, healthy, tireless, vibrant, and I have no doubt about the strength of the work we’ve done.”

The group, which has so far spent $77 million on ads to boost Trump, announced plans to run the ad in the key battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita hinted last week that the campaign intends to exploit Harris’s support for Biden in the months leading up to the debate, when the president’s performance raised concerns about his stamina.

“Do you know how many files we have on this?” LaCivita said Thursday at an event outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Along these lines, Republicans have argued that Biden should immediately resign as president if he concludes he cannot serve another four-year term.

The Trump campaign and allies also plan to argue that Harris is the point person in the administration to address the border — a key theme in GOP messaging this year — after Biden nominated her in 2021 to address the root causes of migration from Central America. They also plan to link her to the country’s inflation problems and are plotting similar messages about crime that they previously prepared for Biden.

“For the last four years, she signed on to Biden’s open border policies and green frauds that have driven up the cost of housing and groceries,” Trump’s new running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, said Sunday after Biden endorsed Harris. “She owns all of these failures.”

It remains to be seen, however, whether voters who for months told pollsters they feared a 2020 rematch will gravitate toward a fresh face. Many voters — including those who planned to vote for Trump when he faced Biden — have deeply negative views of the former president and have expressed a desire to abandon him.

Harris also has an opportunity to reenergize Democrats who have grown disenchanted with Biden’s presidency. One veteran Republican strategist said Trump should prepare for Georgia — which Democrats have come to believe is out of reach — to become competitive again.

“Biden was struggling with black voters and young voters,” the strategist said. “It seems to me that Kamala will probably do better with those groups. The question is how much.”

Brian Bartlett, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Trump could also face new headwinds in swing states depending on who is chosen to join the Democratic ticket as vice president.

“The writing has been on the wall for a while, so I would expect them to be pretty prepared with messaging and opposition and things like that,” Bartlett said. “The biggest potential challenge I see is if (Harris) picks a running mate who can flip some of the blue wall or other key swing states.”

Some of those names have already been floated as possible vice presidential picks, including Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.

The Trump campaign has prepared dossiers on some of these individuals, believing they could also emerge as potential successors, which one senior adviser referred to as “briefcases full of investigations.” Other names they have studied include Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and congressional leaders.

But most of their focus in recent weeks has been on Harris, they said, including conducting internal polls to test her in a matchup against Trump, a second senior adviser said.

Asked if they had begun testing Trump against other Democrats in polls, LaCivita responded last week, exasperated: “We’re a capable operation. What the hell do you think?”

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