Donald Trump predicted he would face Kamala Harris, but he wasn’t ready for the reality of an election reset that put him on his heels.
The former president is diluting his own message with scattershot attacks on the vice president and, for the first time in his political career, has struggled to stay at the center of national attention.
Between the historic passing of the baton from President Joe Biden to Harris and the public vetting of Trump’s own vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the most famous man on the planet became a relative afterthought at the tail end of last month.
But that changed quickly Wednesday, when he sat down with three members of the National Association of Black Journalists — all women — for a televised interview in Chicago.
Trump was combative from the start. He immediately criticized how questions to him were presented, slammed the organization that invited him and made baseless, racist claims that Harris, who is both Indian American and Black, only recently began identifying as Black. The latter comment quickly dominated the airwaves, and Trump doubled down on the assertion Thursday by posting a photo of a young Harris with adults dressed in traditional Indian clothes.
“I think he did it on purpose,” said Andrew Hitt, former executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin. “There are a lot of policies from his first term that were really, really great for the Black community, but you need to go to the right place to have that conversation.”
“I don’t think the place they chose was designed to do that,” he added.
Trump advisers say they were expecting an “unfriendly audience” and that the criticism that stemmed from his performance there both does not bother them and is something they don’t view as something that will weigh them down.
“He did not necessarily articulate a plan ahead of time,” a Trump adviser said of whether or not Trump planned to walk in the room and pick a fight. “But it was an unfriendly audience, we knew that, and they ended up being nasty. He did what he does best and pushed back.”
The 30-minute exchange did serve the purpose of taking the news cycle away from Harris and getting everyone talking about Trump again. It’s a position he famously associates with power and winning the day, even if being the center of attention comes with intense criticism, as it did this week.
“I think folks think it’s Trump reverting to his Id,” a longtime Republican communications adviser said. “And they believe that always works out for him, even if it does not make sense at the moment. But I think everyone recognizes that it was a way off message and a vein of anti-identity politics that is much dicier running against Kamala.”
In other words, the race-based attacks he’s used in the past may backfire on him when he’s running against a Black opponent. But as that instinct shows itself again, many Republicans are openly pleading with him to focus on Harris’ record, which includes significant flip-flops in key policy areas ranging from energy policy and gun control to health care and border security.
“I think it shifts away from the discussion that I want to focus on, but it may very well be that we have a difference of opinions about what’s going to move the voters,” said Sen. Tom Tillis, R-N.C. “I for one think it’s the failure on the economy, the failure on the border and the failure on national security.”
With fewer than 100 days left until Election Day, NBC News talked to almost two dozen Republican and Democratic insiders about their views of the race after a series of historic shake-ups and how they see the final stretch playing out. Almost universally, they see a race that is tightening, a front-runner in Trump who is feeling that pressure, and an underdog in Harris who still has work to do to prove herself to the electorate.
If Trump’s fumbling to find his feet, it’s because the earth moved under him over the course of about five weeks in June and July. He already felt like he was in a good position to win back the Oval Office when Biden stumbled badly in a June 27 debate — so badly that Democrats began calling for a new candidate.
For more than two weeks, the Democratic Party descended into chaos. Then, at a rally in western Pennsylvania in mid-July, Trump survived an assassination attempt. Two days later, he named Vance as his running mate at the opening of a Republican National Committee love fest. Everything was coming up Trump — including public and private polls that led Democratic insiders to believe that Biden had no path to victory.
On July 21, Biden announced that he would end his re-election campaign and threw his support behind Harris, helping ensure that she would take over as the Democratic nominee. Since then, Democrats have seen an uptick in polling that suggests the race has become closer to where it was before the Biden-Trump debate.
A Washington Post polling analysis released Thursday found that Harris had improved from Biden’s position in all seven of the most hotly contested battleground states — albeit modestly in each state — but that Trump is still leading in five of them and tied in another. The only state in which Harris has the edge, according to the Post analysis, is in Wisconsin, where she leads by a single point, which is within the margin of error.
“The momentum is with Vice President Harris, and we just need to work our hearts out until Election Day,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said. “When you are an African American and Asian American woman running to make history, you are by definition an underdog.”
Harris calls herself an “underdog” — a label that politicians love — and many Democratic strategists say she’s right.
“We are in the irrational exuberance phase of this insane election for voters,” said Chris Kofinis, a veteran Democratic operative. “Is it close? Yes, but it was close with Biden as the nominee. The reality is this is somewhere between 2016 and 2020 — and that’s the problem.”
In 2016, Trump narrowly defeated Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton in a race in which a change of less than 80,000 votes over three states would have reversed the Electoral College outcome. Four years later, Trump lost to Biden, with fewer than 50,000 votes over three states separating victory from defeat.
Trump allies say they’re confident about his standing, particularly if he can stay focused on Harris’ record and platform.
“It’s clear in recent weeks the president looks very pleased and is in a great position politically,” said Ed McMullen, a Trump bundler who served as U.S. ambassador to Switzerland during Trump’s term. “His rallies and comments show he is excited and will enjoy running against Kamala and the treasure trove of opposition research the Biden-Harris record presents.”
Trump’s orbit of advisers both see the utility of Trump focusing on Harris’ record, but also understand that Trump has made a career out of trusting his attack instincts, and those in the room are not overly concerned if he continues to also lean in on things like Harris’ racial identity.
“Definitely the most important thing to do is contract policy difference, and he has and will be doing that,” the Trump adviser said. “But for a long time, people have questioned DJT’s tactics when he attacks and he is often proven right. I would say the jury is out on whether those types of attacks are not going to work.”
‘He was upset’
As Harris’ momentum was building in the week after Biden announced he was leaving the ticket, the Trump campaign was hitting a wall.
Vance was quickly dogged by past comments he made about “childless cat ladies” and generally got off to a less than ideal start. It left Trump stewing and upset about how his campaign appeared to be left unprepared for the onslaught of momentum-sapping attacks from Democrats.
“He was upset for a bit, I don’t think that’s unfair. It’s not like there was ever real talk about dumping him [Vance] or anything, but the president’s mood was sour,” a campaign adviser said.
Two people familiar with that matter said Vance got himself back in Trump’s good graces with a solid performance during a joint appearance last weekend in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and his continued Trump-approved performances on a West Coast swing earlier this week.
“I would not say there was any angst at all; there was just a sudden change in the race. There was a world for a while there where the media was not helping the other side [Democrats], and now they are again,” the Trump adviser said. “We are not just back to normal. There was a moment where that had to be internalized.”
The person said that Vance will intensify his role as an “attack dog” and get more aggressive “pushing back on her gaslighting, and go hunting for her and be sort of aggressive to try and bracket Kamala.”
Now, the campaign is focused on trying to regain momentum against a new opponent who has energized Democrats, and has yet to pick her running mate or host the Democratic National Convention.
“I think the Trump team had an unprecedented three weeks of great news after the debate, so we all knew it was going to course-correct at some point,” a Trump fundraiser said. “But I was surprised at how quickly that happened, and we still have to deal with the VP pick and convention.”
Trump has plenty of time to stabilize in the race’s closing months, the person said, warning that the campaign should not underestimate the energy and financial boost Democrats have gotten by replacing Biden, whose age was each day becoming more apparent, with a much younger Harris.
“I’ve talked to them,” the fundraiser said. “My only concern is that that’s not being taken seriously enough.”
Because Harris’ candidacy emerged so late in the election cycle, all the traditional timelines are also shortened.
A candidate gets what’s commonly referred to as a “sugar high” in polling and momentum after consequential events like picking a running mate, but there is normally time for the opposition to survive that wave and return any race to the status quo. In this very unique case, though, there is much less time.
“I am supposed to tell you that this is all just a sugar high for Harris,” a GOP operative and Trump supporter said. “But we don’t know. It’s such a unique cycle. Every bump starts on a sugar high, until it’s not. 100 days very quickly becomes 80.”
When and if the race steadies and begins to mirror the final stages of a traditional campaign, the focus will almost certainly turn to seven key swing states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada. What’s more, the outcome is likely going to hinge on just thousands — not millions — of potential swing voters in that narrow group of hyper-important states.
“Harris is a stronger candidate than Biden; she takes age off the table as an issue and can read a teleprompter. There is energy there,” the GOP fundraiser backing Trump said. “Just like it did in 2016 and 2020, it will come down to those 100,000 or so votes in a handful of key states.”
“That’s what the final 100 days will determine,” the person added.
‘It’s a jump ball’
For Democrats, there has been a switch in candidates but not strategies, according to Harris aides.
“We have multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes,” Dan Kanninen, battleground states director for the Harris campaign, said of the threshold for winning the electoral college. “The vice president is strong in both the ‘blue wall’ and the Sun Belt, and we’ll be running hard in both.”
The ”blue wall” is a reference to Rust Belt states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — that backed Democrats in most recent presidential elections but favored Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020.
Though polling showed a tough road for Biden in keeping Georgia, Arizona and Nevada in his column in 2024, some Democrats believe that Harris has breathed new life into their efforts to win those states, as well as North Carolina, where Trump won by less than 1.5 percentage points in 2020.
If the battleground strategy hasn’t changed, the campaign’s messaging has been adjusted to suit the new candidate. Many of the broadsides against Trump are the same — that he’s “unhinged” and presents a threat to democracy — but, with 81-year-old Biden out of the picture, Democrats are making Trump’s age, 78, an issue.
There’s no question that the Democratic Party has been energized and unified in the days since Harris took over for Biden as the presumptive nominee. What is less clear is the trajectory of a race that has been shaken, stirred and turned upside down in just the last month or so.
“It’s a jump ball, for now,” Kofinis said.
The message discipline dilemma
The Trump campaign and his Republican allies think that the former president has the right messaging mix to not only retake momentum, but also close out the final months of the campaign with a winning message.
Much of what is expected to come from a formal messaging operation focused on the positions Harris carved out that appealed to a more liberal Democratic primary base when she was running for president in 2020. Many of those are now seen as liabilities in a general election.
During her failed bid for president, Harris advocated things like a single-payer health care system, at one point floating the idea of doing away with private insurance; talked about the idea of a mandatory buyback program for some guns, something fiercely opposed by Republicans; and flirted with the idea of abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an idea that at the time was popular with progressives. Harris also contemplated banning fracking during her 2020 run, an industry important to Pennsylvania’s economy, but her campaign advisers now say she is not considering it.
It’s a mix of past policy proposals now generally seen as left of mainstream in a general election and the fact she has reversed her position on them has Republicans confident they have the making of the backbone of a winning message for Trump, and potentially saving key downballot races even if he stumbles.
Harris’ campaign says that what voters see is a contrast between her “pragmatic approach” and Trump binding himself inextricably to “extreme ideas.”
“While Donald Trump is wedded to the extreme ideas in his Project 2025 agenda, Vice President Harris believes real leadership means bringing all sides together to build consensus,” Harris spokesperson Lauren Hitt said, referring to a series of policy initiatives put together by Trump allies to seed a future administration. Project 2025, which had been attacked by Democrats, announced that it would stop working on policy after taking criticism from the Trump campaign.
The Harris style approach “made it possible for the Biden-Harris administration to achieve bipartisan breakthroughs on everything from infrastructure to gun violence prevention,” Hitt said. “As president, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common-sense solutions for the sake of progress.”
Trump has brought up Harris’ position changes during some rally speeches, and it’s soon to be a prominent part of contested downballot races in key swing states. The first of those test runs was done for Pennsylvania for Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick. An ad paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee for his campaign against Democratic Sen. Bob Casey featured a long list of Harris’ positions when she was running for president, along with her flipping on the issue of fracking.
Versions of that line of attack will be Republican’s blueprint as they try to flip the Senate. The TV spot will be retrofitted to also attack Montana Democratic Sens. Jon Tester, the lone incumbent Senate Democrat to not endorse Harris so far, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Both are in intensely competitive races.
“Tester and Brown are both going to see that sort of stuff. That’s the message,” said a Republican operative familiar with the strategy. “Harris was a sitting senator with hours of public footage taking far-left positions on issue after issue, they should have to answer for that.”
Trump has himself leaned into Harris’ record, something Republicans hope to see more of moving forward.
“She pledged to ban fracking … oh, that’s going to do well in Pennsylvania, isn’t it,” Trump said during his Minnesota rally. “Remember, Pennsylvania, I said it. She wants no fracking. She’s on tape. The beautiful thing about modern technology is when you say something, you’re scared if it’s bad.”
The fear for his supporters, however, is that Trump’s notorious inability to display message discipline will get in the way.
After he sat down with the Black journalist organization, for example, there was already a firestorm about his performance and questioning whether Harris is Black. The same night as the NABJ event, Trump had a rally in Pennsylvania that could have helped him turn the page and focus on fracking, a key aspect of Harris’ biography that would be beneficial in an important swing state.
Instead, rallygoers were greeted by an image on the big screens of a headline that called Harris the first “Indian American senator,” a message intended to back up Trump’s comments earlier in the day that Harris has identified as Indian, not Black. It ignored other headlines from that era that did identify Harris as “the second Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate.”
Trump barely brought up Harris’ race at the rally, but one day later he was posting about it on social media. That included amplifying a post from far-right agitator Laura Loomer that allegedly showed Harris’ birth certificate along with the message “Kamala Harris is NOT black.”
Trump also posted a picture of Harris with Indian members of her family, and a separate post that included a video of her cooking with the actress Mindy Kaling, who is the daughter of Indian immigrants.
In the video, Harris talks about the fact she is Indian.
“Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black,” Trump wrote on social media. “This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!”
