Donald Trump’s political team has been preparing to run against Vice President Kamala Harris for weeks, something it got one step closer to Sunday after President Joe Biden said he is dropping out of the race.
“We are pretty excited about the fact that he endorsed Kamala,” said Richard Grenell, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany and Trump’s acting director of national intelligence. “As we know in California, she has never been vetted. … Kamala Harris is a product of this whole system. She’s very far left, unvetted and untested.”
There is no guarantee Harris will replace Biden as the Democratic nominee, but in the hours after Biden announced he was getting out of the race, he and several other key Democrats, including potential rivals, endorsed her candidacy, making her even more of a favorite than she already was.
It’s what Trump’s team and Republicans more broadly expected would happen. And they have been ready.
Last week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee came chock-full of attacks on Harris, while Trump’s speech accepting the nomination was written with no direct mentions of Biden; he ad-libbed just one mention of the president. During his 2020 speech accepting the Republican nomination, Biden’s name came up more than 40 times.
“Joe Biden is the worst president in the history of the United States by far,” Trump said in a brief interview Sunday with NBC News, adding: “We will fix what he has done. He should never have been there in the first place.”
Harris, a former senator from California, has said she still has to “earn and win” the Democratic nomination, but she is the only declared candidate and is expected to have a considerable leg up in the process.
“I think we all knew it was going to happen,” another Trump adviser said.
“It’s better it happened sooner rather than later so we know who we are running against,” the person said. “But my strong guess is it will be Harris. I can’t imagine they would deny the opportunity to an African American female who has been basically a heartbeat away already.”
In the weeks after Biden’s disastrous late June debate performance, Republicans began fine-tuning a messaging strategy that places a heavy focus on Harris with the idea she would ultimately be the Democratic nominee.
“Donald Trump will beat any Democrat who makes it out of whatever backroom deals are cut at the DNC,” said Tim Murtaugh, a top adviser on Trump’s 2020 campaign. “They all have to answer for the failures of the Biden administration and the damages inflicted on this country, and they all helped lie to the country about Biden’s cognitive decline.”
Early signs point to a three-pronged attack.
Republicans will focus, in large part, on the idea that Harris regularly saw Biden behind the scenes and engaged in what they will frame as a cover-up that shielded the public from his deteriorating condition.
“I think they have to drive home the point that Kamala Harris was the No. 1 enabler in the cover-up of President Biden’s mental decline,” Tricia McLaughlin, a Republican strategist and top adviser on businessman Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2024 campaign, said of how Trump’s campaign will press the attack on Harris.
It will also emphasize how, early in Biden’s term, he put Harris in charge of addressing the “root causes” of the wave of migrants making the trek north from places like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. That responsibility led Republicans to dub her the “border czar” — a term that has been increasingly used in recent weeks as the GOP anticipated Harris’ stepping in for Biden. The term was used in at least seven speeches during the Republican convention, and the Republican National Committee quickly put out an ad amplifying that political nickname.
“We’re not talking about Barack Obama or even Hillary Clinton here,” said Zack Roday, a Republican strategist. “Kamala Harris is at best a completely unproven national politician. She owns every failure from Biden and the cover-up of his decline. Her candidacy is built on a foundation of failures and lies.”
David Bossie, Maryland’s representative to the Republican National Committee and a Trump adviser, emphasized the point that Trump and Republicans see a cover-up of Biden’s deteriorating age and mental acuity.
“Many Democrats and those in the White House press pool owe America an apology,” he said. “This has been a cover-up for years, and Kamala Harris owns it.”
The third prong leans on another contention, arguing that senior Democrats pushed Biden out of the race, trampling on the voices of primary voters who had made it clear Biden was their preferred nominee. While that approach appears on one level to be sympathetic toward Biden, it telegraphs a secondary front in the messaging war. Republicans see it as potentially neutralizing attacks from Democrats who often accuse them of being dangerous for democracy.
“This move showcases their elitist mentality and their complete and utter disregard for the voice and will of the American people during the primary election process,” Alabama GOP Chairman John Wahl said in an emailed statement. “Democrat voters chose Joe Biden as their nominee, and this shameful manipulation of the election process is disrespectful to the American people as well as the democratic process.”
Pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. is also expected to quickly update ads already in rotation in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada with messaging focusing on “Harris was in on the cover-up,” according to a source familiar with the decision.
“Kamala Harris is less accomplished than Joe Biden — aside from his failures that cripple her candidacy — and less likable than Hillary Clinton,” MAGA Inc. CEO Taylor Budowich wrote in a text message. “While the Democrats navigate this new chaos of their own creation, MAGA Inc. will expose her coverup and failures that have left our nation suffering.”
Bossie said that there is also little space between where Harris and Biden stand on key issues like the economy and immigration and that there will be an effort to tie her to those administration policies that have generally been unpopular, according to most public polling.
“The Biden-Harris administration is the worst in American history,” he said. “Their policies created carnage on the southern border, created chaos across the economy and an inflation monster. They have the worst record, and you can’t just put lipstick on a pig.”
Jason Miller, a Trump senior adviser, told NBC News that the campaign is ready for any scenario Democrats present.
“We’ve polled, we’ve done the research, we have the ads cut. We’re completely ready to go. This campaign is ready for anything that the Democrats throw at us,” he said. “And the thing that really stands out from the Harris-Biden administration is that Kamala Harris owns all the failures of the past 3½ years.”
Miller also said they were prepared for “anyone else,” but his answers were generally Harris-focused.
Biden’s historic exit from the race has been just another in a long line of massive ups and downs that have defined the 2024 race.
Through much of the spring and the early parts of the summer, Biden was seen as the slight favorite, and he had what most saw as an easy cash advantage throughout the race. But after Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records, his political base saw it as an unfair weaponization of the justice system, and a wave of campaign contributions came in, which was in the beginning stages of altering the race’s narrative.
Democrats have tried to focus on Trump’s conviction, contending that it disqualifies him from being a major-party presidential nominee, but the issue has not only not dismayed GOP voters; it has brought them together.
Then came Biden’s poor debate performance, which gave Trump and Republicans more momentum. And most recently, there was the July 13 rally in Pennsylvania where a would-be assassin’s bullet missed taking Trump’s life by mere inches. The assassination attempt further energized Trump’s supporters leading into the Republican National Convention.
With Biden stepping aside — which many in the party had hoped for — some of those dynamics could now be in play for Democrats.
Democrats raised $27.5 million in small-dollar donors in the first five hours after Biden’s announcement, according to ActBlue, an online fundraising platform that raises money for Democrats.
“Grassroots supporters are energized and excited to support her as the Democratic nominee,” the organization posted on social media.
Justin Day, a prominent Florida Democratic fundraiser who is raising money for, among others, the Democratic Governors Association this cycle, said he thinks the change at the top of the ticket will get some Democratic donors off the sidelines.
“I have already heard from a number of donors who have not participated this cycle, who have reached out to tell me they are all in, no matter who the nominee ultimately is,” said Day, who was Florida finance chair for the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “Focus has shifted back to beating Trump.”
Harris has been faring the same as Biden in most public polling against Trump. In the most recent NBC News polling, both Biden and Harris trailed Trump by 2-point margins, which are within the margin of error.
But there is some hope among Democrats that moving on from Biden will rid Democrats of the problem of having a candidate who is perceived as too old. Trump is now the oldest major-party presidential nominee in history, as well as the first former president to be convicted of a crime.
“You know, he’s got felonies, he’s got all the liabilities that are still out there,” Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., told NBC News. “We now have someone with energy, with a connection to my state, someone who can talk about the accomplishments that she had.”
Peter Navarro, an aide in Trump’s White House, said Biden’s getting out should harden the Trump campaign’s efforts to shape the election around politics, specifically immigration, the economy and education, but he acknowledged Democrats could see some bump simply for moving away from Biden.
“This was a given and well understood within the Trump campaign weeks ago, and we knew they were going to pull this,” said Navarro, who days ago was released from federal prison after he was convicted of contempt of Congress related to the Jan. 6 investigation.
“I don’t think anything changes with this,” he added. “There might be a slight bump just because Biden is so flat.”
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., a Trump-endorsed Senate candidate, didn’t think the changing of the guard in the Democratic Party would make much difference at all, though.
Biden’s ending his campaign, Banks said, “means [Trump] wins by even more.”