Former President Donald Trump has faced a rocky transition period since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, as his campaign has often been undercut by negative news cycles, sometimes of his own making.
Trump, who was once the front-runner after surviving an assassination attempt, has seen his previous polling advantages virtually erased since Harris replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. This past week, the Cook Political Report reset its ratings to “toss-up” for Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada after earlier moving them to “lean Republican.”
In recent weeks, the Republican presidential nominee was forced to defend his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who found himself at the center of a firestorm over resurfaced remarks that the country was being run by “childless cat ladies.” Trump then claimed Harris “turned black” to gain political advantage, and at a rally in Atlanta, he publicly attacked Georgia’s popular Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) and his wife, Marty Kemp, a move allies worry could hurt Trump in a critical battleground state. And in Montana, the former president called Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) a “slob” with “the biggest stomach I’ve ever seen.”
In a freewheeling press conference last week, Trump flashed his frustration with Harris’s rise and routinely insulted her intelligence. He claimed he drew a bigger crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, than Martin Luther King Jr. did for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Over the weekend, Trump accused the Harris campaign of using artificial intelligence to enhance the size of her crowds in an effort to downplay enthusiasm for the new Democratic ticket.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) warned Trump to stop questioning the size of Harris’s rallies and instead focus on her record as a candidate during an interview with Fox News on Monday.
“You’ve got to make this race not on personalities,” McCarthy said. “Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position when it comes to what she did as [California] attorney general on crime. … What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a czar?”
While Republicans are urging message discipline, Trump is instead participating in an unscripted live interview on X later Monday evening with X owner and billionaire Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump’s campaign. The forum is poised to open Trump to more candor as the former president returns to the social media site.
Behind the scenes, Republicans across the country are beginning to worry after Trump and his campaign have struggled to define Harris and recalibrate their message.
“Trump is often his own worst enemy,” said Dennis Lennox, a Michigan-based Republican strategist. “There is definitely a growing sentiment out there amongst Republicans, including Republicans who have legitimate MAGA bona fides, that Trump is blowing this election, not just Trump, but the people around him that enable him.”
Trump has held fewer rallies in battleground states and has held fewer rallies in general than in previous cycles. Since the beginning of July, he has held a total of eight rallies, plus his speech at the Republican National Convention. When asked last week why he was not on the campaign trail as much, Trump pointed to his poll numbers.
“I’m leading by a lot,” he told reporters. “And because I’m letting their convention go through, and I am campaigning a lot. I’m doing tremendous amounts of taping here, we have commercials that are at a level I don’t think that anybody’s ever done before. Plus, in certain cases, I see many of you in the room where I’m speaking to you on phones, I’m speaking to radio, I’m speaking to television.”
Trump will return to Pennsylvania this weekend with a rally in Wilkes-Barre. Lennox believes this is where the campaign needs to start prioritizing after “taking their eye off the ball.”
“I place the blame squarely at the people who were publicly measuring the drapes inside the White House before and during the convention. They were talking about ‘oh we are going to win New York, Colorado’s in play, Virginia’s in play, New Mexico, New Jersey is in play, and we are going to spend money there,’” Lennox said. “They took their eye off the ball.”
“The Trump campaign needs to spend every dollar it has left in the bank on Georgia and Pennsylvania,” he added. “Those are the only two states that matter.”
Meghan McCain, a conservative TV personality and the daughter of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), has attacked both presidential frontrunners but has gone as far as to suggest that Trump is purposely trying to lose the election.
“I literally was just having a text exchange about whether or not Trump actually wants to win now,” Meghan McCain said Sunday during a livestream on 2WAY. “I don’t even know how you course-correct. If it was me working on this campaign, I’d be like ‘so this is all hands on deck, emergency situation, the Titanic’s going down.’”
The Trump campaign is firing back against criticism, attempting to bring the conversation back to Harris’s record.
“President Trump has continually prosecuted the case against Kamala Harris by highlighting her dismal economic record, the out-of-control border, and skyrocketing inflation rate that is decimating American families,” said Trump spokesman Steven Cheung in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner.
“Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is stealing policy ideas from President Trump, like No Tax on Tips, and has flip-flopped on important issues like fracking and gun rights. The weak, failed, and dangerously liberal Kamala-Walz ticket is the most radical in American history,” he added.
Trump returned to X on Monday after he was banned from the platform in 2021 when his supporters stormed the Capitol. He’s been promoting his interview with Musk, who took over the platform previously known as Twitter.
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Lennox emphasizes that the election will not be won on X and warned the Trump campaign that time is running out.
“In my home state of Michigan, 1.5 million Michiganders will cast an absentee or early ballot this year, and those ballots will be dropped around September 26,” he said. “It’s not about winning on election day anymore. This election is going to be won or lost in September and October.”
