NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump The Trump campaign has been fiercely attacking the Trump campaign over the past year and a half Joe Bidenridiculing his policies, mocking his mistakes and enjoying a revenge match that they felt they were winning.
But they also spent weeks preparing for the possibility that Biden would drop out of the race, preparing a series of attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris that they unleashed once Biden declared his presidency. stunning announcement sunday that he would step aside. Biden soon after endorsed Harris, who quickly gained support from Democrats to become the party’s nominee.
“Rest assured, we are 100 percent ready,” Trump pollster and senior adviser Tony Fabrizio said last week at the Republican National Convention. He noted that speakers at the event frequently referred to the “Biden-Harris” administration in their speeches and said the campaign had prepared anti-Harris videos to share in case Biden leaves office early.
Still, the shake-up less than four months before Election Day presents new challenges for Trump’s team, which until recently has been focused on contrasting the former president’s strength and mental acuity with Biden’s. Trump now faces a new, yet-to-be-determined opponent at a time when voters have made clear they are frustrated with their current choices and desperate for new, younger options.
While Trump’s advisers wanted Biden to stay in the race, they have argued that a campaign against Harris — who they see as the most likely Democratic nominee — would not be all that different from their race against Biden.
They will try to tie her to what they see as the failures of the Biden administration, saying Harris is complicit in everything that happened on Biden’s watch. That’s especially true when it comes to the handling of the southern border. Harris was tapped to leading the government’s response to the border crisis.
In a statement Sunday responding to the news, Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita and fellow campaign manager Susie Wiles lashed out at Harris, insisting she “will be WORSE to the people of our country than Joe Biden.”
“They own each other’s records and there is no distance between the two,” they said.
They will also continue to accuse her of being part of a cover-up surrounding Biden’s deteriorating health, because they believe voters have lost trust in Democrats and the press for failing to expose Biden’s weaknesses sooner. And they will attack her record in California, where she served as a district attorney and attorney general before being elected to the Senate.
They have also made it clear that they want to continue to undermine Biden – and in a sense are still running against him – by arguing that if he is not fit to run, he cannot finish his term and should therefore resign.
“Joe Biden cannot withdraw from a presidential campaign because he is too mentally incompetent and still remain in the White House,” LaCivita and Wiles wrote in their memo. “Biden is a national security threat who is in profound cognitive decline and poses a clear and present danger to every man, woman, and child in our country.
Trump’s campaign tried to push Biden to stay in the race, including by portraying Democrats’ efforts to replace him as a “coup.”
But they started step up their attacks on Harris immediately after last month’s debate.
In a post celebrating Independence Day, Trump singled out Harris on his Truth Social site, calling her his “potential new Democratic challenger” and giving her a new derisive nickname: “Laffin’ Kamala Harris.”
While Trump publicly maintained that he still believed Biden would be the ultimate candidate, he was captured in an expletive-filled video saying he thought she “would be a better” rival.
“She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic,” he said.
During his rally in Michigan Saturday night, Trump polled the crowd, asking if they would rather see him run against Biden or Harris. The crowd erupted in cheers when Trump mentioned Biden. Harris’ name was met with boos.
He also continued to make fun of Harris’ laugh, calling her “crazy” and “nuts.”
When the news finally came, Republicans were ready.
Less than an hour after Biden’s announcement, Trump’s campaign’s social media feeds were full of snippets of Harris’s previous statements that could turn off some voters, including one in which she supported a ban on plastic straws.
Trump’s main super PAC, Maga Inc., also released a new ad attempting to blame Harris for Biden’s policies.
“They created the mess. They—no, Kamala—own this failed record,” the narrator says.
The chaos now engulfing the Democratic Party as it tries to find a new candidate comes just days after the Republican National Convention, where Republicans rallied behind Trump and presented a united front after he narrowly survived an attempted assassination at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Michael Whatley, chairman of the Republican National Committee, described the situation as “a pretty divided screen.”
“We are a completely united party,” Whatley said in an interview on Fox News Channel, while “the Democrats are in free fall.”
Whatley said Republicans would not change their plans despite the Democratic realignment.
“President Trump is going to run his race and whether it’s Kamala Harris or somebody else, they’re going to run on the exact same failed agenda that Joe Biden has been running on for the last four years,” he said.
However, it remains unclear how a new candidate at the top of the Democratic ticket will change the dynamics of the race.
Polls have shown Harris’s popularity ratings are similar to those of Trump and Biden. An AP-NORC poll from June found that about 4 in 10 Americans have a favorable opinion of her, though the share of those who have an unfavorable opinion was slightly lower than for Trump and Biden.
At 59, Harris would represent a striking generational contrast to Trump, who turned 78 last month. She would also be the first Black woman and the first person of South Asian descent to become president — a potentially groundbreaking candidacy that could draw new support from women, minorities and younger voters.
Trump has a long history of making offensive remarks about women and people of color, something Harris is likely to highlight during the debate and on the campaign trail.
Harris is also the Biden administration’s leading voice on abortion rights, an issue that has dogged Democrats since the overturning of Roe v. Wade and could boost turnout again this fall.
Because he had to debate a former prosecutor, Trump called Sunday for the next debate to be moved to friendlier grounds, with Fox News as the moderator instead of ABC, as previously agreed.
At a meeting of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and The Cook Political Report last week, Fabrizio, the pollster, said Harris is hardly the definition of a vice president.
“The only thing voters know about her is her smile,” Fabrizio said. “And that goes for both sides of her.”
Republicans have also hinted at the possibility that they will take legal action to keep Biden on the ballot.
However, Edward B. Foley, a law professor and director of the Ohio State University Election Law Center, said political parties have control over their nomination processes and a Republican legal challenge is unlikely to succeed.
“I just don’t see how the Republican Party or anyone associated with the Republican Party would have the right to file a lawsuit related to this,” he said. Unlike a general election, “in primaries, voters give input, but they don’t control the decision.”
___
Associated Press editor Christina Almeida Cassidy contributed to this report from Atlanta.