Donald J. Trump and his political team spent nearly two years tailoring a campaign to defeat an old white male president who is conspicuously frail and who most Americans had told pollsters they doubted could handle another four-year term.
Suddenly, Mr. Trump faces a starkly different opponent: a vice president who is a Black woman, nearly 20 years younger, and who brings her own strengths and weaknesses but who adds new uncertainty into what had been a remarkably static race.
Allies of Ms. Harris have already telegraphed that she will run a campaign framed around a “prosecutor versus felon” theme, highlighting her experience as a prosecutor and underscoring the fact that Mr. Trump has been indicted in multiple jurisdictions and convicted of 34 felonies.
The prosecutor-versus-felon approach may appeal to undecided voters who had been sour on both Mr. Trump and President Biden. It may also goad Mr. Trump, who reacts strongly to criticism, into resurrecting the language he has used against other Black female prosecutors, such as Letitia James in New York and Fani Willis in Georgia, both of whom he has called “racist” and attacked in personal terms.
In a preview of what’s to come, Ms. Harris made the prosecutor’s attack line explicit during an appearance on Monday, describing her past as the district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California.
“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. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said.
Mr. Trump, for his part, has been trying to soften some of his harshest rhetoric about seeking vengeance on his rivals ahead of the general election. But over many years, he has turned off a sizable proportion of college-educated voters and suburban women with his rhetoric on gender and race — and the Harris candidacy introduces the risk of Mr. Trump lashing out at her and further alienating those voters.
Mr. Trump has a long history of attacking female rivals and critics in personal terms, usually describing them as mentally unstable or worse. He called Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, “that bitch” in front of officials in his own administration while he was president, according to the book “I Alone Can Fix It,” by the Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. Mr. Trump’s use of the phrase was later confirmed to The New York Times.
In the case of Ms. Harris, the contempt is displayed both in public and private. Mr. Trump has told people that she “speaks in rhyme” — a mocking reference to her occasional word-salad sentences that have gone viral on social media, have become mainstays on Fox News and have been lampooned on liberal comedy shows.
Publicly, Mr. Trump has described her as “nasty,” “crazy” and “disrespectful,” mocked her laugh, mispronounced her name and promoted a false claim that Ms. Harris is constitutionally ineligible to serve as vice president, echoing his racist “birther” campaign against Barack Obama.
In a post on Truth Social on Monday afternoon, Mr. Trump accused the news media of trying “to turn ‘Dumb as a Rock’ Kamala Harris from a totally failed and insignificant Vice President into a future ‘Great’ President. No, it just doesn’t work that way!”
Ms. Harris is now garnering extensive media attention, and drowning out Mr. Trump. People close to him have acknowledged that such a circumstance usually prompts him to try to insert himself into the news cycle somehow, often in self-destructive ways.
“I think there’s a real chance that he overplays his hand on the attacks on her,” said Lauren Leader, the founder of All In Together, and an advocate for advancing women in business and politics. “I don’t think it’s strategic for him, I think it’s automatic.”
Mr. Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton did not cost him a victory in the 2016 presidential race. And despite his widely criticized behavior in his final year in office amid the coronavirus pandemic and protests stemming from the police killings of unarmed Black men, he lost by roughly 40,000 votes in three battleground states that settled the race.
A number of the fundamentals of this year’s contest still benefit Mr. Trump, according to Republican strategists, who see enthusiasm in the party’s base and antipathy toward Mr. Biden’s record as helping their nominee. Mr. Trump’s presidency has been viewed more favorably in hindsight than it was at the time, polling has showed. And his advisers question how Ms. Harris will perform on the national stage in a sustained campaign of her own, after her 2020 effort failed to make it all the way to the Iowa caucuses.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, called Ms. Harris “just as incompetent as Joe Biden and even more liberal. Not only does Kamala need to defend her support of Joe Biden’s failed agenda over the past four years, she also needs to answer for her own terrible weak-on-crime record in California.”
Changing a major-party presidential nominee this late in the race is unprecedented in modern political history. It’s unclear whether Ms. Harris can outperform Mr. Biden in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that represent the Democrats’ clearest path to the White House.
“The Trump campaign will still be running against a failed Biden-Harris presidency that has presided over record inflation, an economy that is not meeting voters’ expectations and record illegal immigration,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies. “The swing states remain the same, and the target audiences have changed little.”
Still, as a potentially historic figure, Ms. Harris could be positioned to win back a meaningful number of Black voters who had either drifted away from Democrats or have said they’re supporting Mr. Trump, as well as reinvigorate the party base. She could help widen an already pronounced gender gap that Mr. Trump is facing. And she has already helped significantly with fund-raising, which Mr. Biden saw collapse after the debate as donors tried to drive him from the race.
The Trump team has made an aggressive effort to win over Black and Latino voters without college degrees. Polling indicates that younger Black men, in particular, have been more receptive to Mr. Trump than they have been to any Republican candidate in modern history. Facing a Black opponent could scramble Mr. Trump’s coalition.
Mr. Trump had crossed paths with Ms. Harris long before they were rivals in 2020. He donated to her re-election campaign when she was California’s attorney general, contributing $5,000 in 2011 and $1,000 in 2013. At the time, Mr. Trump was facing a potential class-action lawsuit in the state from people who claimed his for-profit Trump University business classes bilked them out of money.
Since then, Mr. Trump has attacked her savagely, particularly when she became Mr. Biden’s running mate in 2020.
“You know, I want to see the first woman president also, but I don’t want to see a woman president get into that position the way she’d do it — and she’s not competent,” Mr. Trump said in August 2020.
A month later, he declared, “People don’t like her. Nobody likes her. She could never be the first woman president. She could never be. That would be an insult to our country.”
Mr. Trump has insisted he is unconcerned about the change in the Democratic ticket and looking forward to the coming race.
But his campaign’s actions over the past few weeks cut against that confident posture. On Sunday, Mr. Trump, who has insisted he would debate Mr. Biden anytime and anywhere, appeared to try to change the terms of the second debate. On Truth Social, he posted that the debate should be moved to Fox News, a channel on which he receives favorable coverage, from the agreed-upon ABC.
After Mr. Biden’s calamitous debate performance against Mr. Trump, the former president and his team softened their criticisms of the president. They also held back advertising that could further damage the president. They wanted Mr. Biden as their opponent and they hoped he stayed politically viable until it was too late for Democrats to replace him without major legal hurdles.
In recent weeks, advisers to Mr. Trump had begun to prepare for a potential Harris candidacy. They cut anti-Harris videos ahead of the Republican National Convention and poll-tested her vulnerabilities for a general election matchup against Mr. Trump, and have tossed out several messages against her.
Mostly, they plan to bind her to the most unpopular aspects of Mr. Biden’s record — especially the spike in inflation and record border crossings earlier in his tenure — and to suggest she is more liberal than Mr. Biden.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the political arm for Senate Republicans, instructed its candidates on how to frame attacks on Ms. Harris, echoing the themes the Trump team has been using.
The Trump expanded orbit, including the main super PAC supporting him, has begun trying to portray her as part of a scheme to hide Mr. Biden’s frailties from the public, as well as pick at her record in California as a senator and prosecutor.
Since Mr. Biden announced his decision on Sunday to quit the race, Mr. Trump and his advisers have complained about all the money they’ve wasted running a giant campaign against a candidate who is no longer their opponent.
Jessica Mackler, the president of the group Emily’s List, which supports the campaigns of Democratic women who back abortion rights, described the new race as “a very different engagement for Donald Trump and one that he’s on the losing side of.”
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