Trump tries to focus his election campaign on an attack on Kamala Harris | US elections 2024

Donald Trump is currently trying to target his campaign against Kamala Harris, with ads attacking her current record in office and her past in California after Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The Trump campaign views Harris as the likely Democratic nominee, especially after Biden pledged his support, and has in recent weeks begun preparing research dossiers against the opposition to her. But as much as Biden’s withdrawal has left Democrats reeling ahead of their nominating convention next month, it has in many ways also rattled the Trump campaign.

Trump-aligned political action committees like MAGA Inc. will launch a wave of attacks against Harris, including a $5 million television ad in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona portraying her as a puppet master of the Biden administration.

Trump’s campaign believes Democrats fear a potential backlash from their progressive base if they sideline Harris, who is on track to become the party’s first black female candidate.

Still, some senior Trump campaign advisers are unsure whether she will actually be the nominee, which would further complicate her strategy.

Trump’s campaign was always designed to defeat one person – Biden – and Trump’s allies have even tried by all means in recent weeks to keep the president attractive as a candidate because they were so keen to run against him.

The problem for the Trump team is that it cannot use its best attack arguments against Biden, namely his age and mental acuity. And if anything, the Democrats may repeat those arguments against Trump since he will now be the oldest candidate.

And the millions of dollars the Trump-aligned Pacs have spent creating attack ads against Biden — including just last week an ad that took aim at Biden’s gaffe at last month’s presidential debate about military deaths — have been wasted.

A Biden resignation is the worst-case scenario for Trump’s campaign in the 2024 election, the two sources said, and ironically, everyone from Trump himself to the young press advisers are urging Biden to stay in the race.

The Trump campaign last month effectively issued an internal directive to ensure that its aides did not publicly endorse the Democratic pressure campaign to pressure Biden to drop out, for fear they could help derail the campaign, the Guardian reported.

For weeks, the Trump campaign has been more focused on running against Harris than Biden, with some senior advisers saying Harris is better at communicating messages on abortion and Trump’s legal woes.

Harris has been vocal on the issue of abortion rights, an issue that Trump’s advisers say is a potential electoral defeat after Republicans far underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of the Roe v. Wade ruling.

And Harris’s past work as a prosecutor could cast a negative light on Trump’s recent conviction in New York. He is accused of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money scheme to influence the 2016 election.

Some Trump allies, including members of the influential MAGA Inc. and Save America Pacs, have also noticed that she can be humorous at times; clips of her quirky quips – such as “did you just fall out of a coconut tree?” – have gone viral on TikTok and other social media sites.

Another problem for Trump’s campaign is that there are currently no endless variations on the Democratic ticket: Harris could be at the top of the ticket, along with any number of possible running mates, or Harris might not be on the ticket at all.

However, the Trump campaign team is also convinced that Harris has her own disadvantages and that these would undermine any successes and momentum she might achieve in the coming weeks leading up to the Democratic Party convention, which begins on August 19, the two sources said.

The Trump campaign believes it can portray her as the person responsible for the “open” southern border of the United States under the Biden administration and define her by her tenure as a U.S. Senator and before that as Attorney General of California and District Attorney of San Francisco.

In doing so, she is seeking to revisit the same issues that plagued her during the 2020 Democratic primaries. Back then, she was criticized for her soft stance on crime and her overly generous leniency toward first-time drug offenders when she was a prosecutor in California.

Read more about Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election: