How Trumpworld Is Coping With the Kamala Harris Boom

Donald Trump’s campaign said it anticipated for weeks that Joe Biden would drop out of the presidential race. “We have long planned for a change at the top of the ticket—just didn’t know when it might come,” a senior Trump adviser told me. But Trumpworld likely didn’t forecast the speed with which Democrats would rally around Kamala Harris. “She has been totally dominating,” a top GOP strategist marveled on Tuesday after the Harris campaign reported it had raised more than $100 million since its launch. “Biden was a layup. Harris has a shot,” said another prominent GOP operative.

It will take several days for polls to assess Harris’s standing in the race. But in the meantime, the Trump campaign isn’t waiting to unleash a multipronged attack. According to Trump advisers and sources close to the campaign, Trump and MAGA allies want to tie the vice president to Biden’s record while at the same time defining her as a radical San Francisco progressive who is out of touch with working-class voters. “She’s a weak candidate, terrible communicator, and has extremist views on everything from immigration to energy to the economy to national security,” Breitbart’s Washington bureau chief, Matthew Boyle, told me. The goal of these attacks, sources said, is to damage Harris’s appeal with voters in industrial Midwest states—otherwise known as the Democrats’ “blue wall. “Everything is about running up white working-class rust belt voters,” Boyle said. “Remember, that’s how Trump won 2016.”

This being the Trump campaign, the attacks on Harris are already turning vicious (so much for Trump’s “change” following the failed assassination attempt). On Truth Social, Trump called Harris “Dumb as a Rock” and “a totally failed and insignificant Vice President.” Meanwhile, MAGA social media accounts have been pushing racist and misogynist memes and tropes about the would-be first Black female president. The risk, of course, is that this scorched-earth strategy could alienate women voters and independents whom Trump would need in a close contest. A Republican close to the campaign said some donors have told Trump that picking J.D. Vance looks like a mistake now that they’re going up against a Harris-led Democratic ticket. The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta reported on Monday that some Trump allies fear Vance will hurt Trump’s ability to win swing voters in a tight race. Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called any suggestion that Trump doubts picking Vance “fake news in every sense of the word.”

Trump advisers said the Harris boomlet isn’t sustainable. “It’s day one. It will pass,” a 2020 Trump campaign veteran told me on Monday. Still, there are signs that the Trump campaign’s outward confidence belies an internal recognition that Harris presents a bigger challenge than did a diminished Biden. On Tuesday afternoon, Trump dialed in to a media call on border policy, a forum usually reserved for campaign aides. He maligned Harris as a “radical-left person” and claimed she would “make the invasion on our southern border exponentially worse.” After his remarks, Trump opened it up to questions (Fox News got the first one, natch). Trump told reporters that he’d be willing to debate Harris multiple times. He also claimed he doesn’t regret choosing Vance as his running mate. “I’d do the same pick. He’s doing really well,” Trump said.

There’s also the question about money. With Democrat dollars pouring into the Harris campaign, Trump will need Elon Musk—historically a fickle donor—to make good on his reported promise to spend $45 million a month to elect Trump. (Musk has seemingly denied making such a promise, responding to a report about it with a meme calling the news “fake.”) “Elon is a blank check. He’s invested in this,” insisted a Republican close to Trump.

Harris’s candidacy certainly faces a daunting task of fundamentally resetting a race in which Democrats are losing. But Republicans worry that Trump risks underestimating her. “She has four weeks to reset,” said one top GOP strategist. “Sometimes you gotta be careful in politics [with] what you wish for.”