Former President Donald Trump won’t give up on taunting President Joe Biden as he tests out new lines of attack against his current opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump has joined Republicans in painting Harris as a “San Francisco radical” who failed as Biden’s “border czar.” His campaign’s first ad against Harris used the immigration crisis witnessed under Biden to call her “dangerously liberal.”
But he has simultaneously continued to incorporate material about Biden into his speeches. “He was choking like a dog,” Trump said of their debate at a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, describing Biden’s exit from the race two weeks ago as an undemocratic takeover.
“They did a coup, he just doesn’t know it,” Trump quipped in a dig at Biden’s age.
The preoccupation with Biden suggests a degree of whiplash among Republicans, who just days ago were hoping Democrats would reconsider replacing him at the top of the ticket.
Trump focused so heavily on Biden at a rally in Minnesota that the Harris campaign asked, “Does he remember who his opponent is?”
“I don’t want to waste a lot of time, because it’s over,” Trump told the crowd despite repeated jabs at Biden’s golf game and other lines from old stump speeches.
However, Trump has simultaneously begun to refine his pitch against Harris, who will become the new Democratic nominee on Monday.
He’s taken to painting Harris as a “California socialist” masquerading as a centrist, mixed in with complaints about the perceived honeymoon she is receiving from some parts of the media.
“This is the lunatic who the fake news is building up to be the next Margaret Thatcher,” he said on Saturday, referring to the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister.
Republicans squirmed this past week as Trump falsely accused Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, of “becoming a black person” later in her career, something they called a needless distraction from her record. But Trump has continued to make character attacks, melding her biracial identity and policy positions into a critique that she is a “phony.”
On race, the complaint is manufactured. Harris has identified as black in both her formative years and throughout her career. She attended a black sorority at Howard University and was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus during her time in the Senate.
But the Trump campaign appears to see her authenticity as a weakness. His running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), accused Harris of faking a southern accent at her own rally in Atlanta and called her a political “chameleon” in defending Trump’s racial attacks.
“I think our whole campaign is going to have a very fun time pointing that out,” Vance told reporters aboard his campaign plane on Wednesday.
Trump focused little on the theme at his Saturday rally. Instead, he stuck tightly to the script that Harris is “ultra left,” citing her past flirtations with the defund the police movement and grassroots demands that Immigration and Customs Enforcement be abolished.
Her authenticity was a major focus a few days earlier, however, at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Harris has renounced some of her past policy positions since taking over the Democratic ticket, and Trump used the rebrand to accuse her of being “fake.” She no longer supports gun confiscation programs or a ban on fracking, both stances she held during her 2020 run for president.
“The contrast could not be more stark. On the one hand, you have a radical left puppet candidate who is fake, fake, fake, and on the other hand, you have a president who will fight, fight, fight for America,” Trump said in Harrisburg.
It will be impossible for Trump to get away from Biden entirely. Defining Harris successfully will mean associating her with the record of his administration, in particular on the border.
In fact, the hope that Republicans can convince the public that Harris is “worse” than Biden is central to their new election pitch.
“She is actually worse than he is, because she’s a real radical left,” Trump said on Wednesday. “He’s a phony radical left. He didn’t believe in this stuff.”
Nonetheless, Republicans have warned against dwelling too long on Biden with just three months to define their new opponent. Meanwhile, Democrats have pointed to Trump’s racial attacks as a sign his campaign is struggling to reset.
Polls show a tightening race in battleground states despite Trump’s claims that he still leads by wide margins.
Democrats have largely maintained their attack lines against Trump, calling him a threat to democracy whose divisive rhetoric disqualifies him from holding office. Preserving access to abortion remains the other plank of their reelection pitch.
Harris’s past positions represent a liability to the party, while her low approval ratings were a concern to Democrats as they weighed replacing Biden.
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But her ascension to the top of the ticket has allowed them to reinforce the case Biden had made against Trump.
Harris has emphasized her career as a prosecutor and California attorney general to paint Trump as a felon who only looks out for himself. As the second woman to lead a major party ticket, she is also viewed as a more natural messenger on abortion following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
