Where is the Trump campaign? We know where former President Donald Trump is. We see him holding rallies, testing messages, probing for weaknesses, for better or worse. We know where Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) is. He’s raising funds and speaking at the southern border. But what about the people Trump authorized to provide covering fire?
They’re certainly in the news — their campaign infighting, their attacks on conservative Republicans, their denunciations of outside aid organizations — but what about their attacks on the Democratic nominee and their actual opponent in the general election, Vice President Kamala Harris?
Trump is famously known for his “do what you want and let God do the rest” approach, so what exactly did his campaign staff add?
The first ad against the Harris raid was
Tweet This was done by Senator Dave McCormick’s campaign in Pennsylvania. Hours after Harris was thrust upon the Democrats, McCormick’s strategy seemed on message. But where was the backing from the campaign’s higher-ups? The campaign leaders seemed totally blindsided by the long, slow public coup against Joe Biden. If that wasn’t enough, it took them weeks to adjust to the candidate swap after it actually happened.
The Trump campaign finally aired TV ads on Tuesday, nine days after Harris’ announcement. Meanwhile, super PACs have completely saturated the markets in battleground states except for North Carolina. A campaign ally told The Blaze News that the Trump campaign is holding off on its attacks until later in the race, allowing super PACs to get to work first and avoid running out of money in the final weeks, as they did in 2020.
That makes sense. PACs pay a premium fee, often double the campaign’s fee, and as the actual election approaches, that amount can go up to
10 times preferential rates offered to candidates.But what does the campaign actually do when it outsources almost everything except advertising to the Republican National Committee?
Top adviser Chris LaCivita on Thursday launched a series of tweets attacking House Freedom Caucus Chairman Bob Good (R-Va.), who lost in a primary recount that day. Personal feuds in the state are common in politics, but 31,216 conservative Republicans voted for Good in a state where LaCivita was paid to win in November’s election. What’s the plan there?
The big campaign story that morning featured Kellyanne Conway, a longtime Trump aide who is paid $50,000 a month to lobby in support of Ukraine, naming more than a dozen anonymous staffers to reporters for undermining Vance. Vance has been a vocal opponent of U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. She’s not part of the campaign, but she’s certainly part of the fray.
The day before, LaCivita and his top counterpart, Suzie Wiles, published a letter attacking the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and dozens of former Trump campaign members who are building a platform for Trump’s return to the White House. Wiles and others wrote the letter on campaign letterhead with Trump and Vance’s names at the top and their signatures at the bottom.
Speaking of Vance, his speech on the southern border was a rare ray of light in a dark week, shining a light on the White House’s historically poor border security. He delivered a blunt message on one of two issues that American voters repeatedly rank as top of their priorities. It was a political primer, overshadowed by the interruptions of backstabbing and the obvious fact that the senator has been relentlessly attacked since announcing his intentions and has offered little in the way of defense from his own camp.
“It is campaign tampering that left JD vulnerable to relentless attacks,” one of Trump 45’s White House spokespeople told Blaze News.
Sure, it’s hard to stay on the defensive during your opponent’s media honeymoon and with all the focus on Harris, but Vance is a fighter who was isolated to withstand endless attacks. Why wasn’t he sent out to “Meet the Press” or other shows? He’s proven more than capable of fighting on his own.
Meanwhile, the campaign’s top officials claim they are trying to tone down the noise from the outside (Project 2025) and focus on winning. If the results of that focus on winning were any indication, that might be persuasive. Their biggest pluses so far have been fighting for the debates, Biden being elderly and demented, and the candidate himself controlling the message during the trial (and staying silent during Biden’s collapse). But no one believes the campaign staff followed through on those. Trump is famous for doing what he wants, and the rest is in God’s hands. So what exactly did they add? If not, it looks like two weeks spent jealously guarding his personal power base.
The press is in full swing for war, and after four years of porous borders, runaway inflation, wars overseas, terrible job growth, and a nearly ineffectual president, the Democrats are somehow on the offensive. 91 days until Election Day. Victory declarations are over. This is a real election. It’s time to start fighting.
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In other news
Defending President Trump’s attack on Harris’ identity (and why it hurts)
You see, when Trump told a room of black journalists that Kamala Harris had once described herself as more Indian than Jamaican, there was jeers and heckling from the room, but any nuance there was an end to it. The political world was aghast. How dare he do that!
CNN and the New York Times described Trump’s remarks as racist.
yawnBill O’Reilly, a time traveller from 2015, said that when we talk about race, we’re losing, while Abigail Shrier made the obvious (and very good) point that political attacks are only effective if they inspire your own supporters more than the other team. But has the problem been solved?
Trump’s core message is that Kamala Harris is fundamentally a total fake, and he spread it more than three months before the election in a hysterically provocative way that WMAL and The Daily Caller’s Vince Colianese called “like kicking a hornet’s nest with a bicycle.”
The news this week had been devoted to Mr. Vance and the childless Catwoman, and suddenly every corner switched to the veracity of one of the Democratic Party’s most sacred totems: racial politics.
It’s not 2004 anymore. You can’t drown out the noise by tapping flip-flops at a John Kerry rally. To inspire people, you need to be provocative. And this wild man who attacked former President George W. Bush on 9/11, attacked Sen. John McCain, who was a POW in Vietnam, and denounced the historically intelligent, kind, soft-spoken Dr. Ben Carson as a violent psychopath and a bad doctor was exactly the man to do that.
Trump threw her off-kilter and drew attention again. He took aim at Harris’s personality, calling her a poseur. And he’s not alone in this view. Even Biden, according to Politico heavyweights Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns,
I quietly realized “She doesn’t seem to know what she wants to be.”
Tuesday, November 5th, is three months away. The American public is already distracted by the near-assassination of the most famous man in the world on live television. Keep calm and carry on. Meanwhile, the key for ordinary Republican politicians caught up in this torrent is not to repeat his words but to use them to mount a more widely acceptable version of the attack.
Unharded:Political families have lost their luster
audience:Josh Shapiro’s sexual harassment cover-up scandal is actually pretty bad
See you again in a week
A few paragraphs after telling everyone to get to work, I’m loading my family into the truck and heading to Ocean City, Maryland to eat blue crab, ride some big waves, and document the terrible state of my tattoos.
SecretsUntil next week,
