The campaign for GOP nominee Donald Trump has spent a lot of time and effort attacking and trying to dismantle President Joe Biden.
In some ways, those efforts worked, even if they didn’t work as the campaign may have envisioned.
Biden announced on Sunday that he would no longer be seeking re-election, and immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. With many Democratic elites and donors already lining up behind her, the Trump team is quickly re-focusing its efforts on targeting Harris.
Reports are saying that Trump’s campaign is assuming that Harris will be the Democratic nominee following Sunday’s developments. As such, the campaign is preparing research dossiers about how best to attack her in advertisements, media blitzes, speeches, debates and more with only a little more than three months until the election.
MAGA Inc and other political action committees aligned with Trump are preparing to unleash attacks on Harris. One such campaign will seek to cast Harris as the Biden administration’s puppet master, and that is set to air in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Leaders in the Trump campaign believe that Harris will eventually become the Democratic nominee, for a variety of reasons. For one, she’s already in the White House as the vice president, so she has national notoriety.
In addition, if the Democrats try to cast her aside in favor of someone else, they could threaten support they would enjoy from the progressive wing of the party, which is wholeheartedly behind Harris.
At the same time, some senior advisers to the Trump campaign aren’t quite sure about whether Harris will become the nominee, according to a report in the Guardian.
All of this means that Biden’s late decision to drop out of the race didn’t just throw the Democrats into disarray, but is causing some headaches for the Trump campaign as well.
Before Sunday, Trump had the simple task of defeating just one man, Biden. They had built up quite the momentum of taking him down come November, and were thrilled with the possibility that he was staying in the race.
Now, though, with Biden gone, some of the Trump campaign’s biggest talking points — that Biden is too old and frail to be president, and that he has failed in office — are no longer valid.
It’s even possible that Democrats could try to flip the script on Trump, who is going to be the oldest candidate in the race now. Trump is nearly 20 years older than Harris.
He’s also 22 years older than California Governor Gavin Newsom and 26 years older than Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer — two people who have been floated as potential replacements for Biden as the Democrats’ candidate.
All this being said, the Trump campaign can easily link the failure of the Biden campaign to Harris, who was obviously a prominent member of it. They can specifically hone in on immigration failures, considering Biden named his vice president the border czar early on in the administration.
No matter who eventually captures the Democratic nomination, the fact is that this is now going to be a dramatically different campaign than it was a few days ago.
