The Trump campaign, which failed miserably in its initial assaults on Kamala Harris’s newly established presidential campaign, will struggle this week to establish a stronger footing following the vice president’s remarkable transformation of an unexpected race.
Targeting racial identity, fabricating alternate realities, insulting, and gaslighting are some of the most trusted political methods that the ex-president has utilized. As an example, he disseminated a fresh unfounded conspiracy idea about the size of Harris’s Michigan rally crowd last week on Sunday. To date, his attempts to depose his new opponent and her policy of disregarding his provocations have served to expose his flaws more than hers, while also drawing attention to the fact that Harris could provide voters with an alternative.
The former president may have pleased his base fans when he referred to Harris as “dumb” at a rally in Montana on Friday night or made the incorrect assertion that she “happened to turn Black” last month. However, remarks of this like run the danger of turning off women and voters in swing states, and they also had the potential to undo the progress he had made among minorities, which he had taken such pride in highlighting for months. On Saturday, Trump’s campaign was also compelled to refute a claim made in The New York Times, which claimed that he had privately cursed Harris while lamenting her progress.
The Republican nominee still hasn’t accepted the turn of events in a race that appeared to be going his way three weeks ago, when optimistic Republicans left their convention forecasting a landslide; his disorganized news conference last week and his weekend of outbursts further support this impression.
However, Democrats have not felt this much joy in years, thanks to a swing-state trip that Harris and her new campaign partner, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, completed. Trump was enraged because his triumph in the debate with Joe Biden merely sparked a new conflict, one he is more likely to lose.
Harris has offered voters a ray of hope after a dark period in modern history by creating a potential turning point in just three weeks. Her mantra, that Americans “don’t want to go back” to the turmoil and acrimony of Trump’s presidency, has been a source of optimism.
At least for the time being, her strategy has succeeded in making it a close race again. By most accounts, she has made up for Biden’s shortcomings in the polls. For instance, a poll issued on Saturday by the New York Times and Siena College revealed that crucial swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan did not have a clear front-runner, indicating a more competitive race than when Biden was at the head of the ticket. Nothing about November’s outcome is affected by the poll. The rapid change in the campaign was captured by it, though, and the Trump camp felt compelled to issue a statement asserting that the polls had “the clear intent and purpose of depressing support” for Obama.
An unforeseen obstacle has arisen for Harris’s campaign due to the new Democratic ticket’s success in both fending off Trump’s opening attacks and utilizing them to expose what he perceives as extremism. With Biden’s three-week exit from the race and Harris’s acceptance of the Democratic torch, her party has risen to an untenable position only one week before its national convention in Chicago. However, Trump is currently facing an energized party, which is the exact opposite of his advantage he enjoyed while Biden was the ticket leader. New ideas and optimism are once again becoming influential political factors.
While a shortened run-up to November would help Harris’s campaign, there are still almost three months to go. Even after all this time, Trump is still an aggressive political force. Even if he rallied his party behind him after last month’s assassination attempt, he stands to gain from the usual structural variables that influence elections, such as people’ economic cynicism.
On Wednesday in North Carolina, the ex-president is slated to deliver a speech that, according to his campaign, would center on the fact that “hard-working Americans are suffering because of the Harris-Biden administration’s dangerously liberal policies” and “excruciatingly high” costs. If he remains true to his plan, his presence in a state that Democrats are trying to reclaim will show whether addressing basic issues can quell the initial surge of support for Harris’s campaign. In addition, Trump will interview space and automotive pioneer Elon Musk on Monday night about Musk’s X platform, as the president has already indicated.
The vice president is under a lot of heat from Trump for avoiding awkward situations during interviews and news conferences. Additionally, there will be growing concerns about the lack of clarity surrounding the domestic and foreign policies that she has promised to implement as president. On Saturday, Harris informed reporters that this week she will start outlining an economic policy framework. The stock market’s precipitous one-day drop last week demonstrated how susceptible she is to negative economic news that may affect anxious Americans.
Following her magnificent performance with Walz last week, the vice president appears to be very aware that a new chapter in her fledgling campaign is quickly approaching. The stakes are extremely high, that much is certain. During a fundraiser in San Francisco on Sunday, she added, “And we can’t take anything for granted in this moment.”. “The past two weeks have been productive, but we still have a long way to go.”
Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, went on Sunday talk shows to attempt to stem the tide of support for Harris. The Ohio Republican accused Harris of being involved in the actions of the Biden administration that held Americans captive to high prices, branded Walz and the vice president as radical liberals, and pushed out strict border policies. He continued the Republican assault on Walz, which claims, without proof, that he withdrew from the Army National Guard after nearly 25 years in order to evade deployment to Iraq. (According to AWN, Walz put his name in the hat for the congressional race in February 2005, well before his unit received the deployment orders for Iraq.)
On “State of the Union,” Vance told AWN’s Dana Bash that his ticket was up against an unnamed opponent who was even more to blame than Biden for the policies of the past four years. “The thing that sets this apart is that we’re up against an opponent that many Americans are unfamiliar with,” Vance explained. I think it’s important to point out that President Trump accomplished reduced pricing, lower inflation, a peaceful and wealthy world, and a secure border, while Kamala Harris’ ideas have resulted in the complete reverse. People tend to link Joe Biden with the policies, so it was simpler to make that point when he was there.
However, he had no choice except to defend the former president’s frequently disastrous remarks. Harris was born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother; Vance twisted and turned on “State of the Union” to avoid denying Trump that she was not Black. “I have faith in Kamala Harris’s claims,” Vance stated. “I think it’s important to note that President Trump is correct about her chameleon-like personality, though.” The former president gave the sense last week on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he could be willing to limit the mail-order delivery of the abortion medicine mifepristone, and Vance had a hard time resolving this impression.
This ties into Democratic attempts to hold Trump accountable for the national right to abortion being nullified by the majority he helped establish on the Supreme Court. Vance was put in the awkward situation on “This Week” by ABC, where he was asked to denounce Trump’s 2022 hosting of Nick Fuentes, a White nationalist and Holocaust denier who had just made a racist assault on Usha, the wife of the Ohio senator. Fuentes was a “total loser” according to Vance, who praised Trump for “actually will talk to anybody.”
Over one point about Walz’s service record, the Trump team did manage to get a concession out of the Harris campaign on Saturday. An official from the governor’s team informed AWN that the Minnesotan “misspoke” in an old video from 2018 where he claimed to have handled assault weapons “in war.” Voters will have to choose between Harris and Trump in the end, and using Walz to expose her decision-making is not likely to sway their vote.
Consequently, a new turning point in the campaign is imminent: a debate between Trump and Harris, scheduled to air on ABC on September 10. (Despite Trump’s insistence that their first debate will be on Fox one week earlier, Harris has only consented to participate in one debate thus far.)
Harris made a number of gaffes while speaking with the media and interviewing during her term as vice president. Additionally, Trump’s staff has been attempting to provoke her into more spontaneous performances. Her advisers shouldn’t put her in harm’s way now that her campaign is doing so well, particularly in the lead-up to next week’s Chicago convention, when the party’s image-makers will have almost complete control of the media in their efforts to introduce her to voters who are still on the fence.
Still, with her presidential campaign underway, Harris can’t and shouldn’t evade further investigation for much longer. She recently informed reporters that she was considering doing a significant interview by the month’s end.
Although she uses generalizations in her stump speech, it is aspirational and consistent with Democratic doctrine. She has been mum on her views on the unstable global situation, where rival powers like China and Russia pose growing dangers to American influence, since she was nominated. She has instead attempted to avoid political problems by creating a commercial that portrays her as firm on border concerns and paints Trump as an obstacle to successfully reducing illegal immigration.
Given Trump’s disapproval, Harris may be able to win the election by appealing to voters’ optimism and youth as an alternative to Trump’s dark national vision. Since her political vulnerabilities were more apparent during her 2020 primary campaign, her prospects will be clouded by worries about her political dexterity unless she demonstrates great performance in an uncontrolled public environment.
However, Trump has demonstrated in the past several days that he is still unable to adapt to the unexpectedly shifting campaign dynamics.