By Audrey Fahlberg
Ask Republican operatives in Trump’s orbit how they plan to attack likely Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on the campaign trail, and the response goes something like this:
Lay blame on her for every single one of the Biden administration’s failures, argue that she’s more liberal than the current incumbent, and accuse her of being part of the conspiracy to hide her boss’s decline from the public.
The opportunity to poke fun at her political skills, off-putting cackle, and yearslong reliance on vacuous phrases — “what can be, unburdened by what has been” — is just the cherry on top of what Republican strategists are saying is a mismatched campaign fight against an opponent who is weaker in many ways than Joe Biden.
“She is a word salad buffet,” says Dave Carney, a strategist for the pro-Trump super PAC Preserve America, which will begin airing ads during the Olympics.
“It’s like she’s talking to second graders,” he said, adding, “I’m sure that’s not what she is like in real life, I’m sure she has some professional accomplishments, but her public speaking is horrendous.”
Republicans hope to round out the anti-Harris campaign with attacks on her California roots and the anti-democratic nature of her ascension to the top of the ticket.
“That is not how it works. That's a 'threat to democracy,' not the Republican Party – which is fighting for democracy every single day,” Donald Trump’s new running mate, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, told a crowd of supporters in Ohio on Monday.
Republican operatives running Trump-aligned spending groups say they have long prepared for the moment Harris — who secured the support of enough delegates Monday evening to win the 2024 Democratic nomination — would take the reins of Biden’s campaign. Even the Trump campaign circulated a memo one month before the debate gaming out how to respond to a then-hypothetical scenario in which something happened to Biden and the Democratic Party nominated someone else as its nominee, Politico reported on Monday.
Harris’s coronation as the Democratic Party’s new all-but-certain nominee has forced the former president to shake up a campaign that has spent years focused on defeating Biden. As National Review reported on Monday, the new challenge for Trump is to run a disciplined campaign, scale back the divisive campaign rhetoric, and heed the advice of an inner circle of experienced campaign advisers who have consistently shown they are three steps ahead of the competition.
Publicly, his team remains optimistic about his chances of winning the White House.
Yesterday, the Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles shared a new memo with reporters characterizing the new race as “a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to defeat not just one Democrat nominee for president, but two — in the same year! . . . Same year — same people — same record of failure — same result.”
The same day Biden withdrew, MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection effort, began running an ad that criticizes Harris for keeping quiet about Biden’s state.
“She covered up Joe’s obvious mental decline,” a narrator says in one 30-second spot, which began airing on Sunday in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
“But Kamala knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done,” the narrator adds, before blaming her for inflation, high homeownership costs, and the record number of illegal-immigrant crossings that have occurred on her watch.
Another MAGA Inc. video released on Tuesday calls her “dangerously liberal” and rips her for prior statements on immigration, climate policy, and public safety.
Republicans have a lot of material to work with from her first Democratic primary campaign, which she suspended before any votes were cast.
On the 2020 debate stage and campaign trail, for example, Harris threw her support behind single-payer Medicare for All, told voters “there’s no question” she was in favor of “banning fracking,” and said that if circumstances demanded it, she would support nuking the filibuster to “pass a Green New Deal.”
“She spent the Democratic primary tacking to the left, trying to seem like the Bernie Sanders from California, and we’re going to make her pay for that,” MAGA Inc. spokesman Alex Pfeiffer said in an interview with National Review.
Another problem for Harris is that she will be running her campaign with Biden still in the White House, even after he was pressured out of the race following his catastrophic June 27th debate performance.
“She’s going to have to answer: Why should Joe Biden stay in office and not resign?” Pfeiffer added.
“Joe is not going anywhere, and he’s going to keep having these moments that make it obvious to everyone that this person should not be in charge of our nuclear codes.”
While Harris has her fair share of weaknesses – and will be inextricably tied to the failures of an administration she has served for three and a half years – she gives swing voters a reprieve from the unwanted head-to-head rematch between Biden and Trump.
She is comfortable talking about abortion, and, unlike her 81-year-old boss, 59-year-old Harris is a young face who can put in long hours on the campaign trail through Election Day. She’s also inherited Biden’s campaign infrastructure and fundraising committee, and, within the first 24 hours of launching her campaign, raked in a record-setting $81 million.
Democrats insist that her background as a prosecutor will offer a stark contrast to Donald Trump’s newly convicted felon status.
“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said in a Monday campaign appearance.
“So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
And yet Republicans maintain that beyond her policy weaknesses, her gaffe-prone personality — the viral videos of Harris dancing, laughing, and talking about Venn diagrams and coconuts — will play to Trump’s benefit in November.
“Skipping down to the bus and singing ‘the wheels on the bus go round and round’ — that is not what you’re looking for in a leader,” Carney, the Preserve America adviser, tells National Review.
“In a kindergarten teacher, absolutely,” he said,” but not in “a president.”
Audrey Fahlberg is a politics reporter for National Review who previously served as a Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal. Follower he on X at AudreyFahlberg.
