On Politics: It’s instincts over strategy for Trump
It's instincts over strategy for Trump
The latest, with 83 days to go
When Donald Trump held a news conference last week, ostensibly to hit Vice President Kamala Harris for not yet having held one of her own, he said something revealing about how her sudden climb up the Democratic ticket had shaped his own campaign for the presidency — or not. "I haven't recalibrated strategy at all," the former president said. That seems true. For decades, Trump has operated with an instinctive political style that he honed in the tribal and combative world of New York City politics, one that has taken him from Queens to Manhattan to the White House (and out of it). Those instincts are being freshly tested as he struggles to settle on a message against Harris. Instead of resetting his campaign after President Biden dropped out of the race, Trump has spent the past three and a half weeks grumbling about Harris's crowd sizes, grousing about Biden's exit and lobbing a barrage of politically risky insults about Harris's race, first name and intelligence. "It's combative, it tends to be highly personal, and it tends to be highly negative," said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political strategist in New York who has observed Trump for decades. But with polls showing him slipping behind Harris in key battleground states, some Republicans want him to swap instincts for strategy. "Quit whining about her," former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, an erstwhile Trump opponent who endorsed him this year, said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday night, adding, "I want this campaign to win." A road map, rejectedTwo days after Biden dropped out of the race and Harris announced she was running for president, David McCormick, a Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, posted an ad on X excoriating her for positions she took while running in the 2020 presidential race. Some in his party saw it as a clear road map for campaigning against a California Democrat they believed would be vulnerable on issues like inflation and immigration. Trump, apparently, had other ideas. From his first posts on Truth Social through the campaign rallies and interviews he has held since that day, he has made a point of both attacking Biden and complaining that his withdrawal from the race is deeply unfair. He has insulted Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of a state, Georgia, he dearly needs to win. And he has often fired conflicting attacks Harris's way. Is she a legal mastermind behind the criminal cases against him, drawing on her background as a prosecutor, as he claimed on July 24? Or, was she "really bad" at that job, as he also claimed? Is she a "lunatic," more liberal than Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as Trump claimed at a rally in St. Cloud on July 28? Or is she a "phony," as he described her during a two-hour livestream on X on Monday? On July 31, he took aim at Harris's race, bizarrely suggesting that the Black daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica "made a turn and she became a Black person" before bragging about the interview on his social media site. The timeworn tactic of "othering" continued as he repeatedly mispronounced and misspelled her name, saying onstage last week that he "couldn't care less" how it's pronounced. He has repeatedly insulted her intelligence and, at a campaign rally today in Asheville, N.C., said Democrats had elevated her "because they decided to get politically correct." It's an approach consistent with the campaigns Trump saw in New York in the days of Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, Sheinkopf said, that played on racial stereotypes and sometimes pit different ethnic or racial groups against one another. But the approach risks turning off voters of color and women — as well as distracts from the efforts his campaign staff is making through its advertisements to frame the campaign around issues. "The Trump campaign is about Trump," Sheinkopf said, and now he's fighting somebody "he doesn't know how to hit." 'His message gets through'Trump's tactics certainly have their defenders. "It'll never fit the criteria in some political science books," said Dave Carney, a Republican strategist who leads a Trump-aligned super PAC called Preserve America. "In reality, his message gets through." But other Republicans are growing deeply frustrated that he is not focusing more narrowly on what they see as Harris's weaknesses on policy. "He lacks self-control. He lacks discipline," said Eric Levine, a Republican donor who supported Haley during the primary but says he will vote for Trump. "There are all these things Donald Trump should be talking about and instead he's talking about everything else." Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, warned that Trump's attacks on Harris threaten the "permission structure" he had been building for Republicans outside of his base to support him. "You have this very strange victimhood and grievance, which can, when channeled well by Trump, be effective. And right now it is actually actively harming him, because he's marinating in that, rather than actually trying to drive a campaign message and define Harris," Donovan said. In his view, the tables have turned mightily since June, when Democrats were looking at a close race and worrying their candidate — then Biden — would not perform as well as he needed to. Now, he said, it's Republicans who feel that way.
Once close, Biden and Pelosi are at oddsPresident Biden and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi go back 50 years — but they haven't spoken since he bowed out of the presidential race. My colleague Annie Karni, who covers Congress, wrote a fascinating article on the deep freeze. When Joseph Biden visited San Francisco as a freshly minted senator and single father in the early 1970s, it was a well-known local fund-raiser and stay-at-home mother of five, Nancy Pelosi, who lent him her Jeep to get around town. Over the next five decades, the two old-school Catholic Democrats who grew up in the era of Elvis Presley and were inspired by the election of the country's first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, cultivated a natural friendship. They discovered that they both carried rosaries in their pockets. They learned how to wield power in Washington as leaders of top-tier congressional committees: the House Intelligence and Appropriations Committees for her, the Senate Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees for him. In May, at the twilights of their long careers, Biden, 81, awarded Pelosi, 84, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, anointing her the "greatest speaker of the House of Representatives in history." That was then. In July, Pelosi began pushing for Biden to exit the presidential race, and the two have not spoken since he made the difficult decision to step aside. There are multiple reports that Biden is angry with her. (On Wednesday, a person close to him said he was "unhappy" with the way things went.) Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
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