With the defenestration of Joe Biden and the ascent of Kamala Harris, conventional wisdom has gone from asking, “How can Donald Trump lose?” to, “How can he win?”
It’s basically a tossup race, but a successful Harris rollout and convention, coupled with a stumbling Trump performance since Mr. Biden’s exit, have created a sense of irresistible Harris momentum.
As usual when he falters, Mr. Trump is getting a lot of advice from his own side.
For as long as Mr. Trump has been in the ascendancy in the G.O.P., he will go off on some pointless tangent and Republicans will urge him — perhaps as they hustle down a corridor of the U.S. Capitol — to talk about the economy instead of his controversy du jour.
A close cousin of this perpetual advice is the admonition that Mr. Trump should concentrate more on the issues in this campaign. Neither recommendation is wrong, but they are insufficient to making the case against Kamala Harris.
Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life, but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?
Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.
The Obama team hammered Mitt Romney on the issues in 2012, but pretty much every policy argument went back to the core contention that he was a heartless, out-of-touch capitalist who valued the bottom line more than people. That ended up being the winning argument of the campaign.
By the same token, Mr. Trump isn’t going to beat Ms. Harris by scoring points in the debate over price controls or the border.
Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that Ms. Harris is weak, a phony, and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class. The scattershot Trump attacks on Harris need to be refocused on these character attributes.
To wit: Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest this year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.
She has jettisoned myriad positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient. Even if what she’s saying is moderate or popular, she can’t be trusted to hold to it once she’s in office.
She didn’t do more as Vice President to secure the border or to address inflation because she didn’t care enough about the consequences for ordinary people. She doesn’t care if her tax policies will destroy jobs. She has been part of an administration that has seen real wages stagnate while minimizing the problem because the party line matters to her more than economic reality for working Americans.
You get the point. There is plenty for the Trump campaign to work with along these lines.
In 2004, the George W. Bush re-election operation basically took one equivocation from John Kerry, his infamous line about an Iraq funding bill — “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it” — and ran Bush’s entire campaign based on it.
Mr. Kerry’s vote itself wasn’t so important as what the Bush campaign convinced people it said about Mr. Kerry’s character. As the Times described it at the time, “Kerry aides dismiss the sentence as the inevitable verbal hiccup that comes when candidates engage voters in informal settings and complain that the Bush campaign has ripped out of context a perfectly reasonable explanation of the back-and-forth reality of Congress. But Mr. Bush’s team contends it is emblematic of the larger case they are making against Mr. Kerry: that he is a flip-flopping Washington insider unqualified to lead the nation in wartime.”
Surely, the Harris team has kept her under such tight wraps because it wants to avoid a similar “inevitable verbal hiccup” while engaging with people “in informal settings.”
Of course, Mr. Trump doesn’t need much convincing to launch personal attacks. He said earlier this month that he feels “entitled” to them. But calling Ms. Harris dumb or questioning her racial identity does more to undermine him than her. The point isn’t to be gratuitously insulting, but to make a root-and-branch argument that she shouldn’t be — can’t be — president.
Mr. Trump isn’t ever going to become a buttoned-up campaigner who sticks closely to script. There will inevitably be lots of static and wasted time and opportunities. But there’s plenty of room for Mr. Trump, as he insists he must, to do it his way, and still get a better handle on the campaign.
One of his talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power. Everyone knew in 2016 that he wanted to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. It would be quite natural for him, if he settled on this approach, to call Ms. Harris “weak” 50 times a day.
He has also, in the past, been able to pithily and memorably nail core weaknesses of his opponents. His nicknaming may be a schoolyard tactic, yet it has often been effective tool, whether it was “Crooked Hillary” (underling Hillary Clinton’s ethical lapses) or “Little Marco” (diminishing a young primary opponent who lacked gravity). Even people who don’t like Trump or his nicknames would end up using these sobriquets.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has been shrewd to begin to hold smaller, thematic-focused events rather than just set him loose at rallies, where there is the most opportunity for self-sabotaging riffs.
Mr. Trump has said he wants to do to his opponents what they are doing to him. At the end of the day, what they are undertaking is a focused, intelligently designed campaign to disqualify him. Responding in kind doesn’t mean lashing out in Truth Social posts, but crafting a comprehensive anti-Harris argument that implicates, in turn, her suitability for the highest office in the land.
Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.