Donald Trump is scrambling to pivot his campaign against Kamala Harris, with attack ads hitting her current record in office and her past in California, according to two sources familiar with the matter, after Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 race on Sunday.
The Trump campaign is viewing Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee, especially after Biden gave his endorsement, and started preparing opposition research dossiers against her in recent weeks.
Trump-aligned political action committees such as MAGA Inc will unleash a wave of attacks against Harris, including a $5m television ad in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, casting her as the puppet master in the Biden administration.
The bet from the Trump campaign is that Democrats fear the possibility of a backlash from their progressive base if they push aside Harris, who is on track to be the first Black female nominee of the party.
Still, senior Trump campaign advisers are uncertain whether she will actually become the nominee. As much as Biden’s withdrawal has left Democrats floundering, it has also become a headache for the Trump campaign.
The Trump campaign was always set up to defeat one person – Biden – and Trump’s allies in recent weeks even pulled punches to keep the president viable as a candidate because they were so keen to run against him.
The problem for the Trump campaign is that their best attack lines against Biden, on age and mental acuity, cannot be used and, if anything, they might be reprised by Democrats against Trump given he now will be the oldest candidate.
And the millions of dollars that the Trump-aligned Pacs spent creating attack ads against Biden, including one as recently as last week that was centered around Biden’s slip-up at the presidential debate last month about military deaths, have gone to waste.
Biden stepping aside was the Trump campaign’s worst-case scenario for the 2024 election, the two sources said, and everyone from Trump himself to the junior press aides have ironically been urging Biden to stay in the race.
The Trump campaign effectively issued an internal directive last month to ensure its staffers did not publicly pile onto the Democratic pressure campaign pushing Biden to drop out, fearing they could help push it over the edge, the Guardian has reported.
For weeks, the Trump campaign has been more concerned about running against Harris than Biden, with some senior advisers thinking Harris was better at delivering messages on abortion and Trump’s legal problems.
Harris has been vocal on abortion rights, an issue that Trump has told advisers he thinks is an electoral loser after Republicans greatly underperformed in the 2022 midterms following the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.
And Harris’ past work as a prosecutor could negatively highlight Trump’s recent criminal conviction in New York on 34 felonies of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money scheme to influence the 2016 election.
Some Trump allies, including people at the influential MAGA Inc and Save America Pacs, have also noted she can be humorous at times; clips of her quirky phrases – “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” – have gone viral on TikTok and other social media sites.
Another problem for the Trump campaign is that the iterations of the Democratic ticket are currently endless: Harris could be atop the ticket with any number of running mate possibilities, or Harris might not even be on the ticket at all.
But the Trump campaign also believes Harris has her own drawbacks that will cancel out any gains or momentum she might generate in the forthcoming weeks until the Democratic national convention that starts 19 August, the two sources said.
The Trump campaign believes it can paint her as responsible for what they call the “open” US southern border under the Biden administration, and define her by her tenure as a US senator and, before that, as the California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney.
In doing so, it aims to resuscitate the same issues that dogged her in the 2020 Democratic primary, where she was pummeled for being soft on crime and too lenient on first-time drug offenders when she was a prosecutor in California.
Read more about Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 election:
Who will replace Biden? How does the process work?
