Donald Trump is trying to crush Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ persona as a force of change and to destroy her personal credibility as a potential president as their still-fresh competition careens into the final nine weeks before Election Day.
In recent days, the ex-president has unveiled a broad assault using the insult-driven politics with which he won power in 2016, even as his advisers have been pleading with him to focus his attention on top voter concerns including high prices and immigration.
He is seizing on foreign tragedies to accuse the vice president of responsibility for the deaths of US troops in Afghanistan and claiming she’s complicit in killings of hostages in Gaza. He and his running mate, JD Vance, implied her mixed race — heritage that millions of Americans share — is evidence of a sinister “chameleon”-like character that also explains policy reversals on energy and immigration. In an ugly moment, he amplified a sexually themed social media slander against her. And his dark campaign ads allege she will slash Social Security benefits by welcoming millions of undocumented migrants to the country.
And in a reprise of past GOP campaigns branding Democratic nominees as extreme liberals, Trump and his supporters are trying to frame Harris as a communist and a “Bolshevik.” South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem blasted Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, as a “security risk” because he once taught in China. And Trump has also started to imply the coming election might not be “free and fair” and said in an interview that aired Sunday that it was ridiculous to indict him for “interfering” in the 2020 election. This and other recent comments raised the specter of another national nightmare if he loses in November and refuses to accept defeat.
Trump’s desperation to find traction has also seen him perform his own policy gyrations on reproductive rights as he seeks to narrow a huge gender gapin polling. But his credibility may already be shattered after he built the conservative Supreme Court majority that overturned the nationwide constitutional right to an abortion. Vance also seems to have a knack for alienating female voters — like when he compared Harris to a nerve-struck Miss Teen USA contestant.
Trump is not simply being true to his ill-disciplined self. He’s illustrating his struggle to respond to Harris’ transformation of the race. Increasingly brazen attempts to puncture Harris’ bubble of hope also betray frustration in the Trump camp that she’s managing to distinguish herself from her boss and is presenting a fresher option than her 78-year-old GOP rival. And Trump is showing that there’s almost nothing he won’t do to win.
Trump is trying to compensate for his own liabilities
Trump’s invective amounts to some of the most hardline political rhetoric in years, even by his own standards, and means the next two months are likely to be brutal.
The question is whether this barrage of negative attacks is merely successful in stoking feelings of existential anger Trump uses to drive his base the polls, or whether it begins to tarnish Harris at the margins in battleground states.
It may make some sense for Trump to throw everything he can think of at Harris. In two presidential elections, the ex-president has never risen above 49% of the vote in the so-called blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin or in the national popular count. So his chances in November may depend more on destroying the current feel-good factor around Harris and depressing her prospects among small groups of persuadable voters in swing states than on holding out hope of winning over new voters himself.
But Trump’s behavior brings its own risks. His antics last week, including a grinning, thumbs-up gravesite campaign photo-op in Arlington National Cemetery that may have broken the law, could bolster Harris’ warnings that Americans are pining for a chance to leave the bitterness and chaos of the Trump era behind.
Former President Donald Trump leaves Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery on August 26, 2024. Kevin Carter/Getty Images/File
Even though Harris has restored the contest to a neck-and-neck race, her campaign recognizes the still potent threat from Trump. “Make no mistake: the next 65 days will be very hard,” Harris campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillion wrote in a weekend memo despite arguing the vice president has multiple paths to the White House. “This race will remain incredibly close, and the voters who will decide this election will require an extraordinary amount of work to win over.”
