With only a little more than three months before the November presidential election, GOP nominee Donald Trump’s campaign is having to quickly come up with a new plan of attack against a new opponent.
While the Trump campaign had honed in on a direct plan of attack against President Joe Biden — hitting him on a number of areas including his age and lack of mental capacity — that all went out the window when Biden announced on Sunday that he was stepping aside from the race.
Now, it’s likely that Vice President Kamala Harris will be the one who Trump will be facing off against in the presidential election, and according to at least one person in the Republican Party, the former president seems lost.
This week, Trump called the vice president a “radical, left lunatic” as well as “nasty.” Those are similar insults that he threw Hillary Clinton’s way during the 2016 presidential election, which Trump ultimately won.
Other Republican leaders have chimed in, slamming Harris for her poor record as the Biden administration’s “border czar” and as a prosecutor in California. Many have also called her “mean,” “horrible” and “terrible.”
Some people have claimed that Harris is just a “DEI hire,” and that she worked in conjunction with other Democratic leaders to ultimately hide the mental and physical decline of Biden.
But, there’s at least one member of the Republican Party who believes that all of these attacks don’t look good for the GOP, and just show that they don’t have much — as of yet — in terms of a plan for how to defeat Harris.
Michael Brodkorb, who once served as the Minnesota Republican Party’s deputy chair, commented to Politico about Trump’s attacks of Harris:
“They are literally grasping at straws. Republicans desperately wanted to run against Joe Biden. … The introduction of Harris into the race, I think, has upended their attacks and their strategies.”
Ironically maybe, the Trump campaign’s best leverage against Biden — his age, lack of mental acuity and poor performance in the White House — are the exact same things that Democratic leaders used to pressure Biden to drop out of the race.
With the president now no longer seeking re-election, the Trump campaign is faced with an entirely new candidate in so many ways.
While they can definitely connect Harris’ political record to Biden’s — she has served as a top official in his administration, after all — they can’t use age or mental acuity to their advantage anymore. Harris is sharp — or at least seems so when she speaks — and is almost 20 years younger than Trump.
This would all seem to suggest that the GOP would have to take a different approach to attacking Trump’s new opponent. In general, though, that doesn’t seem to be what the party will do.
Not long after Biden’s announcement, Michael Whatley, the chair of the Republican National Committee, said the broader messaging that the GOP would use in the campaign wouldn’t change much. As he told Fox News:
“We are not going to be changing our plans because President Trump is going to run his race, and whether it is Kamala Harris or anyone else, they are going to run on the exact same failed agenda that Joe Biden has been running over the last four years.”