Donald Trump and the Republican Party spent two years preparing for one thing: a 2024 race against President Joe Biden. The GOP nominee and his team knew what they wanted to say, how they’d say it, when they’d say it and to whom they’d deliver the message. The former president would be an imperfect messenger who’d struggle to stay on-script, but Republicans at least had something resembling a plan.
And then Biden passed the torch.
To hear GOP officials and their allies tell it, they were prepared for a pivot. Those assurances weren’t true. Indeed, in the first week of the overhauled presidential race, Republicans — when they weren’t targeting Vice President Kamala Harris with racism and sexism — were reduced to focusing on her laugh, her affection for Venn diagrams and weird complaints about plastic straws.
The second week was no better. One Fox News personality apparently thought it’d be a good idea to talk about the Democrat enjoying wine. Another spent some time focusing attention on Harris hugging people. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy whined, more than once, that the incumbent vice president didn’t call him during his congressional tenure to talk about his party’s non-existent policy agenda.
It was difficult to imagine swing voters in battleground states hearing all of this and thinking, “Well in that case, Harris has lost my vote.”
And then, of course, there’s the GOP nominee himself — who’s now referring to Harris as “Kamabla” for reasons I don’t understand — who spent much of last week questioning the vice president’s racial identity in deeply ugly ways.
When that message didn’t resonate, Trump apparently decided to roll out yet another line of attack: As Politico reported, the Republican spent much of the weekend asking people to believe the vice president is an idiot.
Donald Trump broadsided Kamala Harris in a string of derisive social media posts on Saturday, focusing his attacks on the vice president’s intellect after a week that saw her both out-fundraise him and surpass him in some battleground state polls. In a succession of Truth Social posts after calling off his planned ABC debate with Harris, Trump called Harris “low IQ,” “dumb,” and said she lacked the “mental capacity” to debate him.
That wasn’t an exaggeration. In one online missive, the Republican nominee argued that Harris is “a LOW I.Q. INDIVIDUAL” who “can’t put two sentences together!!!” In another, Trump wrote that the vice president is “really DUMB,” “unable to speak properly without a Teleprompter” and has “an extremely Low IQ.”
At this point, I could write a paragraph or two talking about how Harris is, in reality, smart. I could also add some sentences about how Mr. Let’s Inject Disinfectant Into People probably shouldn’t go around questioning others’ intellectual prowess.
I could even take some time to note that if Trump genuinely believed that Harris is “dumb,” he wouldn’t be so terrified of sharing a debate stage with her.
But there’s a larger point that’s also worth keeping in mind as the campaign advances: The former president is starting to look awfully desperate. Trump thought the race was effectively over after his debate with Biden, and now that the contest has changed, his anxiety about a possible defeat is pushing him toward panic.
“This is what you would call a public nervous breakdown,” Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and former Trump administration appointee, told Politico. “This is a guy who cut through the Republican primary like a knife through butter. This is a guy who pummeled a semi-conscious president in a debate and literally out of a race. And now this is a guy who cannot come to grips with a competitive presidential race that would require discipline and effective messaging. And we’re seeing a candidate and a campaign absolutely melt down.”
Election Day 2024 is three months away. Watch this space.
