Trump’s team is already attacking Harris

CNN
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On the Sunday after the June 27 presidential debate, Donald Trump’s top advisers went to bed expecting the Democrats’ hand-wringing over President Joe Biden’s performance to cool down and give way to a new set of headlines as the new week begins.

But when they woke up the next morning and realized that the situation was getting worse for the Democrats, they began to make plans in advance for the extraordinary event of a possible Biden resignation.

Behind the scenes, between preparations for a convention and a nation-shattering assassination attempt, they also studied the field of potential Democratic contenders, questioned Trump in comparison to a possible successor, and began gentler attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris because they considered her the most likely successor.

Now that Biden has announced he will not run again, the seeds of that work are already visible. Hours after Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday and endorsed his vice president, Trump’s campaign managers released a scathing statement linking Harris to the administration’s policies. Meanwhile, an allied super PAC has reserved airtime in some swing states to portray Harris to impressionable voters as someone who enabled a much weaker Biden.

Trump also quickly moved to gain the upper hand over his next opponent, whoever that might be, by proposing that the next debate be broadcast not by the host network ABC as agreed, but in the friendlier realms of Fox News.

Biden, Trump wrote on social media, “was not fit to run for president and is certainly not fit to hold the office – and never was!”

The Trump campaign’s three-week effort to prepare for the unprecedented may have started as a contingency plan, but it is now becoming an urgent necessity. Although Trump has repeatedly claimed over the past year that he did not expect Biden’s candidacy to last until November, neither he nor his campaign have taken any serious steps to prepare for that outcome.

Instead, Trump’s team had orchestrated a sophisticated campaign for Biden’s victory, including millions of dollars already spent on models predicting outcomes in key battleground states, a sophisticated data operation and an advertising push to contrast the two candidates. It’s a campaign built on the assumption that Trump would face an 81-year-old whose physical condition and mental acuity had become such a liability that enough voters would overlook the Republican candidate’s many flaws.

Now, much of that work will be useless, or at least have to be reimagined for a campaign that has been completely changed by recent events. Whether Democrats nominate Harris or another candidate, Trump, the oldest major party candidate in history, will be the candidate whose age worries some voters.

“The real value that (Harris) brings is simply the fact that Democrats don’t have to worry about whether their candidate meets the minimum requirements for suitability for office,” said a Republican strategist who asked not to be identified in order to speak freely. “That means this is going to be a real election contest.”

For a while, Republicans gleefully watched the chaos unfolding on the Democratic side, and Trump kept a low profile for a few weeks while Biden muddled through the fallout. But soon there was widespread agreement in Trump’s camp that Biden’s withdrawal would also destabilize their own campaign.

As calls for Biden’s resignation peaked in early July, the Trump campaign began examining the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws to understand the internal processes that would take place if Biden resigned, according to a senior Trump campaign official.

Trump’s campaign also began secretly testing new lines of attack against Harris, a woman they had largely ignored since she was sworn in as vice president. This included peppering Trump’s speeches with new criticism of the Californian Democrat and encouraging the former president’s surrogates to do the same, according to two senior Trump advisers.

Some of these new attacks were evident at the Republican National Convention last week, where Harris was the second most criticized Democrat on stage after Biden.

Now that the moment has arrived, Trump’s team is planning a series of negative ads attacking Harris’ record, not only under the Biden administration but also during her time as a prosecutor and attorney general in California, a source familiar told CNN. The messages will be spread through both the campaign and at least one super PAC tied to the former president.

Polls show Harris is the best known of the possible Democratic candidates to succeed Biden, but Trump’s advisers and allies believe most Americans don’t know much about her, which provides an opportunity to characterize her in public.

Leading pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. released a new 30-second ad on Sunday, first shared on social media, outlining the attack plan. The accusatory ad says Harris “covered up Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline.” It then shows clips of Harris praising Biden’s performance as president, saying, “Our president is in good shape, in excellent health, tireless, full of energy, and I have no doubts about the strength of the work we’ve done.”

The group, which has already spent $77 million on Trump advertising, announced plans to air the spot in the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita suggested last week that the campaign wanted to play up Harris’ support for Biden in the months leading up to the debate, when the president’s performance raised doubts about his staying power.

“Do you know how many records we have of this?” LaCivita said Thursday at an event outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

In this sense, Republicans argue that Biden should immediately resign as president if he concludes that he cannot serve another four-year term.

Trump’s campaign and allies also want to argue that Harris is in charge of the border in the administration – a central theme of the Republican message this year – after Biden tasked her in 2021 with tackling the root causes of migration from Central America. They also intend to link them to the country’s inflation problems and plan to use similar crime-related messages that they once prepared for Biden.

“For the last four years, she has co-signed Biden’s open borders and green fraud policies that have driven up the cost of housing and food,” Trump’s new running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, said on Sunday after Biden endorsed Harris. “She is responsible for all of these failures.”

What is unknown, however, is whether voters who have been telling pollsters for months that they fear a rematch in 2020 will choose a new candidate. Many voters – including those who planned to vote for Trump when he ran against Biden – have expressed a deeply negative opinion of the former president and a desire to put him behind them.

Harris also has a chance to re-engage Democrats who have been disappointed with Biden’s presidency. One veteran Republican strategist said Trump should prepare for Georgia – which Democrats thought was out of reach – to become competitive again.

“Biden has had problems with black and young voters,” the strategist said. “It seems to me that Kamala will probably do better with those groups. The question is by how much.”

Brian Bartlett, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Trump could face new headwinds in swing states, depending on who is nominated as vice president on the Democratic ticket.

“The signs have been on the wall for some time, so I expected them to be pretty well prepared with messaging, opposition and the like,” Bartlett said. “The biggest potential challenge I see is (Harris) picking a running mate who can win over some of the blue wall or other key swing states.”

Some of these names are already being floated as possible candidates for vice president, including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.

The Trump campaign had created dossiers on some of these people, believing they could also be potential successors. One of the senior advisers described the dossiers as “folders full of research.” Other names they have investigated include Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, and senior congressional leaders.

In recent weeks, however, their focus has been primarily on Harris, they said. A second senior adviser said they had conducted internal polls, among other things, to test her in the duel with Trump.

Asked last week if they had begun testing Trump in polls against other Democrats, LaCivita responded exasperatedly: “We are a capable organization. What the hell do you think?”

CNN’s David Wright contributed to this report.