Trump’s team had a Harris strategy. Then he went off script about her race
Donald Trump has ignited a firestorm by questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity, an attack that risks harming his larger campaign strategy to define her.
Donald Trump ignited a firestorm by questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity, an attack that risks harming his larger campaign strategy to define her.
Trump and his team are trying to shape how Americans view Harris, just two weeks into her presidential bid, before she can reintroduce herself to the nation as a candidate in her own right. She will get her biggest opportunity to do that at the Democratic National Convention later this month. Before then, the Trump campaign and other Republicans have worked to cast her as inauthentic in how she presents herself and as too liberal for the country.
“We have to work hard to define her,” Trump said at an Atlanta rally Saturday, before quickly catching himself and adding: “I don’t want to even define her, I just want to say who she is: She’s a horror show.” But Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks earlier this week about her identity, which caused some of his aides to gasp, further injected race and gender into the campaign.
The controversy threatens to derail their effort to define her when his campaign, thus far a more disciplined operation than his earlier bids, is eager to blunt the sudden energy for Harris.
At the rally, Trump, whose supporters gathered in the same Atlanta venue where thousands gathered for Harris on Tuesday, hammered Harris as “radical” and a “lunatic” with a “low IQ.” But he steered clear of his earlier allegation that Harris only recently identified as Black. Instead, Trump sought to draw a link between her and President Biden on policy, including Thursday’s historic prisoner swap with Russia, which he characterised as a gift for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
Trump has been frustrated by the positive attention and massive cash haul Harris has attracted, people close to him said. His campaign was hoping to characterise her as being hard to pin down on policy, but instead Trump at a convention for Black journalists earlier in the week took this idea to the extreme and alleged Harris was hard to pin down on race.
The former president avoided going there during the Atlanta rally, but in front of thousands of his supporters, Trump went after Harris’s intellect, speaking abilities and the pronunciation of her first name.
“Ultimately the core of this election is about economic issues. Every time you’re not talking about that, you’re missing an opportunity to engage independent voters,” GOP pollster David Winston said. “Independents always decide who wins elections.” The former president and 2024 GOP nominee told the audience at a National Association for Black Journalists conference in Chicago that Harris has misled voters by publicly identifying only with her Indian heritage, and he falsely claimed that “she happened to turn black” a few years ago.
Harris’s mother was born in India, and her father was born in Jamaica. Both immigrated to the US. Harris’s Indian heritage drew special attention when she became the first Indian-American elected to the Senate in 2016. As a senator, Harris was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. She attended Howard University, a historically Black institution.
Trump’s comments drew immediate backlash, mainly from Democrats, but many Republicans rushed to defend the GOP nominee, describing a strategy to cast Harris as an opportunist.
“Look, all he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon,” Ohio Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, told CNN on Thursday. “She is everything to everybody, and she pretends to be somebody different depending on which audience she is in front of. I think it’s totally reasonable for the president to call that out, and that’s all he did.” Vance, who was once sharply critical of Trump, claimed Harris used a “fake Southern accent” while campaigning in Atlanta earlier this week.
Trump, late Friday, sought to play down any criticism or fallout from the event, writing on social media: “The NABJ event that I went to the other day was attended by a lot of really great people. The support that they gave me, and are still giving me, is very special.” People close to Trump said that before his appearance in Chicago, he had been thinking Harris was being inauthentic in how she presented her race. Several allies said bringing it up in public was ill-advised and a distraction. It harked back to past controversies, including Trump’s falsely alleging former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.
In a sign of how Trump can deviate from his team’s strategy, his campaign didn’t rush to double down on his remarks about her race, instead criticising Harris for over the years taking opposing stances on issues such as fracking. A $US12 million TV ad campaign aimed at battleground states links Harris with problems at the southern border.
Trump also sought to paint the policies of Harris and other Democrats as a danger to democracy, telling rallygoers Saturday that they have been describing him in the same terms for seven years. “I think I got shot because of that,” he added, referring to last month’s assassination attempt against him.
The Harris campaign said in a statement, which was provided before the rally, that vice president “believes real leadership means bringing all sides together to build consensus. It is that approach that made it possible for the Biden-Harris administration to achieve bipartisan breakthroughs on everything from infrastructure to gun-violence prevention. As president, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on commonsense solutions for the sake of progress.” Harris’s rapid ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket has forced the Trump campaign to quickly regroup, following his once-comfortable lead in the polls against Biden.
The two campaigns this week continued to disagree over terms of a debate. Trump said on social media he agreed to a Sept. 4 debate on Fox News, suggesting it in lieu of the Sept. 10 matchup he previously agreed to do with ABC News when Biden was in the race. The Harris campaign said it would stick with the date with ABC. “We’re happy to discuss further debates after the one both campaigns have already agreed to,” Harris’s communications director Michael Tyler said.
The Trump campaign has been particularly eager to court groups with whom Trump has struggled in the past – particularly Black voters.
When Biden was in the race, Trump had in particular seen momentum with Black men, and it is an open question how his remarks about Harris’s race will play. More than 33% of Georgia’s population is Black, according to U.S. census data, the highest percentage among this year’s battleground states.
With polls showing the race between Trump and Harris in a dead heat, the GOP is looking to frame Harris’s record as inconsistent, claiming that she has a history of flip-flopping.
While she is now playing up her career as a prosecutor, Harris was sympathetic to the “defund the police” movement following the 2020 death of George Floyd in police custody. She also once supported banning fracking and supported Medicare for All, which would shift the healthcare system from private and employer-based insurance to a government-run program. Harris backed off that plan during her 2020 presidential bid and has recently reversed her position on fracking.
The Trump campaign has collected video of Harris talking up liberal views and plans to use it in coming attacks and TV ads. Trump has portrayed her as “dangerously liberal” and questioned Harris’s preparedness for the presidency.
Trump’s advisers have always been wary of his propensity to offend, potentially turning off voters and forcing Republican allies to respond — often awkwardly. Asked by a reporter whether Harris is Black, Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) said, “I can assume we’re all a combination of different genetic gene pools so — I don’t know — I think we’re all sort of a mixture.” But Trump isn’t backing down. Despite not mentioning Harris’s race at the rally, he has continued to attack her on social media over her identity, including posting a photo of her with family in traditional Indian attire.
At a Harrisburg, Pa., rally the same day as the Chicago event, a jumbo screen above the stage showed a Business Insider headline declaring her as the “first Indian-American US senator” — which is true. But she was also the 10th Black U.S. senator ever elected.
“Every politician since the beginning of time has tried to relate to the audience they are in front of,” said Rick Tyler, a GOP strategist who was the spokesman for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 bid for the White House. “A strategy of racism, I don’t think, is healthy for the Republican Party, for America in its civil engagements, nor do I think it will be helpful for the Trump campaign.”
— Catherine Lucey contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal
