Don't Let The GOP's Harris Smears Go Unanswered
Some of them are harmless, others are counterproductive, but eventually one will snowball into a big problem.
A substantial body of reporting suggests Kamala Harris’s alternate candidacy sent Donald Trump and his campaign racing back to the drawing board.
A switch in time that enraged swine.
Republicans wanted to run against Joe Biden so badly, and now they’re pissed they can’t. Consider Stephen Miller’s satisfying meltdown here, or the fact that Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio is bracing for Harris to claim a lead in the polls. If you’re a masochist, you can navigate to Truth Social and scroll through Trump’s ongoing meltdown.
It’s not that they had no inkling Biden might step aside for Harris. Days after last month’s fateful debate, Trump called Biden a “broken-down pile of crap” to some golf-course buddy, and boasted, “I got him out of the—and that means we have Kamala.”
As trash talk, it was prescient, but it apparently didn’t translate into contingency planning. It has left Republicans scrambling for new lines of attack as Harris hits the campaign trail vigorously, with tons of well-rehearsed material.
Trump and his allies will thus cobble together a new playbook for a new race on the fly, based largely on trial and error. And for the most part, these attacks will fall into one of two buckets: the vast majority will land with a thud, or backfire, and thus won’t require a ton of strategic attention; but more insidious ones could prove corrosive over time. And sometimes it’ll be hard to tell which is which.