DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN team is preparing new attack lines to use against Kamala Harris after US President Joe Biden dropped out of the election race, US media is reporting.
Biden endorsed the US Vice President not long after announcing the news in a post on social media yesterday.
A number of influential Democrats have since followed, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and high-profile congress members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Adam Schiff.
Democratic fundraising group ActBlue said last night that it had raised $46.7 million (€42.9 million) since Harris’s campaign launch, the biggest single-day haul of the 2024 election.
While it’s still possible that another Democratic candidate could emerge to take on Harris, it is looking unlikely.
Trump’s campaign has spent the last year-and-a-half attacking Biden, ridiculing his policies, mocking his fumbles and relishing a rematch they felt they were winning.
Though Trump aides had wanted Biden to remain in the race, they have argued that a campaign against Harris would not be all that different from facing Biden.
While uncertainties remain about how Trump will campaign against Harris, his team have already begun trying to tie her to what they see as the Biden administration’s failures, saying Harris is complicit in everything that occurred under Biden’s watch.
Trump’s running mate JD Vance said Biden had been “the worst President in my lifetime” and that Harris “has been right there with him every step of the way”.
Joe Biden has been the worst President in my lifetime and Kamala Harris has been right there with him every step of the way. Over the last four years she co-signed Biden's open border and green scam policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries. She owns all of these…
— JD Vance (@JDVance1) July 21, 2024
“Over the last four years she co-signed Biden’s open border and green scam policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries. She owns all of these failures, and she lied for nearly four years about Biden’s mental capacity–saddling the nation with a president who can’t do the job,” Vance said.
In a campaign ad released hours after Biden stepped down, the Trump campaign accused Harris of “covering up Joe’s obvious mental decline” and being responsible for an “invasion” of people across the US border and “runaway inflation”.
“They created this mess. They – no, Kamala – owns this failed record,” the ad says.
In a statement on Sunday responding to the news, Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita and fellow campaign chief Susie Wiles said Harris “will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden”.
“They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two,” they said.
Two people briefed on the matter told the New York Times that the campaign is preparing “a wave of ads” focusing on her record in her current office, her tenure as a senator in California and her time as the state’s attorney general.
This would resuscitate issues that were levelled against her during her 2020 presidential campaign, when she was criticised by some for being too lenient on first-time drug offenders and being ‘soft on crime’, the New York Times reports.
Trump has already told CNN that he thinks Harris “will be easier to beat than Joe Biden would have been”.
At his rally in Michigan on Saturday, the Republican candidate asked the crowd if they would prefer that he face Biden or Harris. The crowd erupted into cheers when Trump mentioned Biden, while Harris’s name was met with boos.
Trump then went on to mock Harris’s laugh, telling the crowd: “I call her laughing Kamala. Have you ever watched her laugh? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She is nuts. She is not as crazy as Nancy Pelosi.”
His remarks were criticised by Democrats online, who referenced his calls for national unity following the assassination attempt on him.
Trump’s history of making insulting comments about women and people of colour is something Harris is likely to highlight on the debate stage and campaign trail if she is chosen as the Democratic nominee.
She would be the first black woman and the first person of south Asian descent to serve as US president – a potentially barrier-breaking candidacy that could draw new support from women, minority voters and younger voters.
Harris has also been the Biden administration’s leading voice on abortion rights, an animating issue for Democrats since the overturning of Roe vs Wade.
It’s likely that she will have this issue at the front of her campaign, which could again motivate voter turnout.
Her work as a prosecutor could also negatively highlight Trump’s recent criminal conviction in New York on 34 felonies of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments.
With reporting from Press Association
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say