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Former president Donald Trump and his Republican allies are planning to go all-in on attacking Vice President Kamala Harris on immigration as she becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
Harris has seen overwhelming support from Democratic elected officials, activists and labor leaders after President Joe Biden announced he would not see re-election and endorsed her.
But the Trump campaign has sought to hit Harris for her record and tie her to Biden’s immigration policies, which polling showed voters overwhelmingly trust Trump to handle more than Democrats. Specifically, Trump has pointed to the fact that Biden gave Harris the task of handling the influx of migrants at the US-Mexico border early in his presidency.
During a press call with the current and immediate former head of the National Border Patrol Council, Trump lambasted Harris’s job.
“Working together with crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris supported a radical left policy of nationwide catch and release, halting all deportations, ending remain in Mexico,” he said.
A memo from campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles blamed her for the influx of migrants across the US-Mexico border in another campaign memo released on Monday evening.
“How do you deal with such heinous beliefs?” the memo asks “Aggressively, in detail, and without quarter.”
The immigration attack is one the campaign focused on as it prepared to face Biden in November. With Harris taking over, it looks like Republicans have made few changes to messaging as they prepare to face Harris in the general election. Trump has even said he would be open to debating Harris.
“I would be willing to do more than one debate, actually,” he told reporters. ”She’s a radical left person, and this country doesn’t want a radical left person to destroy it.”
The Republican attacks come after Harris’s campaign announced on Monday that she had raised $100 million since Biden chose to step aside and she visited Milwaukee for her first event campaign rally.
Harris has also seen a jolt in the polls for Democrats. A Reuters/Ipsos poll showed she had a two-point lead against Trump with Harris at 44 percent and Trump at 42 percent, though still within the margin of error. A Quinnipiac poll showed that Harris was only two points behind Trump when the poll included people leaning toward Harris.
But Trump’s campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio said the vice president would benefit from a “Harris Honeymoon.”
“That means we will start to see public polling – particularly national public polls – where Harris is gaining on or even leading President Trump,” a memo he sent to reporters read. “The Democrats and the MSM will try and tout these polls as proof that the race has changed. But the fundamentals of the race stay the same. The Democrats deposing one Nominee for another does NOT change voters discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs not to mention concern over two foreign wars.”
The memo also noted how Trump witnessed an increase in the polls in recent weeks after being shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a successful convention.
Trump’s allies in Congress repeated the same talking points.
“lt doesn’t matter who the Democrats put at the top of the ticket and Kamala has been there,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told The Independent. “She’s been the vice president. She owns all the failures of the past nearly four years the wide open border over 10 to 12 million illegal aliens in our country, illegal alien crime and murder like Laken Riley.”
Republicans made illegal immigration a staple of their campaigning ever since Trump became the leader of their party. During the Republican National Convention, Republican elected officials heavily focused on instances of undocmented migrants raping or murdering women, as was the case with Laken Riley, a college student in Georgia who police say was killed by an undocumented immigrant.
“All of those I think they can see and the American people can see what a failure she has been as the so called borders are, which means she’s been a failure as the vice president United States, which means you’d be a failure as the president, the United States and everybody in America knows that,” Representative Chip Roy of Texas told The Independent.
But during her trip to Milwaukee, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff brushed off criticisms of Harris.
“That’s all he’s got?” he told reporters. “Look, you heard the vice president yesterday making the case against Donald Trump very clearly. Laid out the case directly, and in a compelling fashion. But she also laid out a vision for the future, a vision where there’s freedom, where we’re not having to talk about these issues of today in this post-Dobbs hellscape that Donald Trump created.”
The coalescing comes less than a month before Democrats descend on Chicago.
