Donald Trump was seeking to seize back the spotlight that had eluded him since President Joe Biden’s shock decision last month to drop his re-election bid jolted the US election.
But the Republican former president did so this week in a way he might not have intended. Appearing in Chicago on Wednesday at the annual conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, an ill-tempered Trump disparaged his hosts and then questioned whether Biden’s presumed replacement atop the Democratic ticket, vice-president Kamala Harris, was actually Black.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said of Harris, who is of mixed Jamaican and Indian heritage.
He also repeated a warning about immigrants taking “Black jobs” without clarifying what those were.
Trump’s remarks — along with the spectacle of an angry former president belittling an accomplished Black female journalist, ABC’s Rachel Scott — prompted disbelief at the conference and beyond.
They also deepened the sense that he has been thrown off-balance by Harris’s entrance into the race, which has electrified what had been a demoralised Democratic party.
Since she was endorsed by Biden and her party’s grandees just over a week ago, Harris has narrowed her party’s polling gap with Trump and raised more money than the former president.
“He’s clearly unnerved. And when Trump is unnerved he becomes verbally undisciplined and hostile,” said Doug Schoen, a veteran political consultant, who was baffled by the former president’s decision to question Harris’ identity.
“It was politically maladroit, at best,” he said. “Politically toxic, at worst. But impossible to fathom in any logical or reasonable way.”
Hank Sheinkopf, another strategist, agreed. “What would you do if you’d spent tens-of-millions of dollars . . . to defeat Joe Biden, and suddenly he’s not there?” he asked. “They have to come up with a new plan.”
Meanwhile, some senior Republicans are questioning whether Trump’s campaign team of Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita have erred by focusing their messaging on the Maga base to the exclusion of a broader audience.
Trump’s recent struggles may be temporary — just as the enthusiasm for Harris may be shortlived, say pollsters. Still, his campaign’s plight is almost unimaginable from a little more than two weeks ago. Then, Trump’s defiance after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania defined his party’s Milwaukee convention and prompted many Democrats to predict he would claim a landslide victory in November.
Yet Trump has sounded angry and self-pitying ever since Biden made the historic announcement that he would cede his place atop the ticket and throw his support behind a 59-year-old vice-president who has become a darling of TikTok. Suddenly, Trump — not Biden — is the old man in the race.
In the immediate aftermath, the former president took to his social media platform to lash out. He questioned, for example, whether an ailing Biden, in fact, had Covid-19, as claimed by the White House.
Trump has since demanded the Democratic party refund the money he spent campaigning against Biden and likened his plight to that of a boxer dominating a prize fight — only to have a new opponent substituted into the ring for the final rounds. “Our whole campaign was geared toward him and now we have to gear it toward her,” he complained on Wednesday.
While Trump has flailed, Harris has strutted. At a rally in Atlanta this week she seemed to relish taunting him. “As the saying goes, you got something to say, say it to my face,” she said to the delight of an exuberant crowd as she challenged him to debate her.
Her emergence is not the only factor weighing on the Trump campaign of late. JD Vance, the Republican vice-president nominee, has also stolen attention — mostly negative — from the former president with the unearthing of past comments in which he condemned “childless cat ladies”.
Vance’s performance thus far has been sufficiently worrying as to spark speculation in Washington about whether his new boss will fire him from the ticket. That would be a rare and shocking acknowledgment of error by Trump.
Part of the frustration among Republicans is that Harris, a former California attorney-general who has veered in and out of progressive politics, should be a ripe target for Trump — if only he could stick to the script.
On Wednesday night, hours after the Black Journalists convention, Trump tested his lines of attack before a friendly audience at the annual farm show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
In a speech lasting nearly 90-minutes, he variously described Harris as a “puppet” controlled by wealthy Democratic donors and party bosses; a soft-on-crime Leftist who presided over the ruination of San Francisco; a liberal who tolerated murderous illegal immigrants; a conspirator who lied to the public about Biden’s mental decline; a phoney, and more.
“Four weeks ago, she was considered, like, the worst,” Trump told the crowd. “All of a sudden, she’s the new Margaret Thatcher. The great Margaret Thatcher! No, I don’t think so. But you’re going to learn.”
It was a robust performance, and received an enthusiastic response from an overwhelmingly White and rural audience. “She’s a joke,” Angie Amig, from nearby York, said of Harris as she left the arena. “She keeps changing her stance, her opinions.”
Yet the Harrisburg rally was drowned out by the race controversy Trump whipped up earlier that day in Chicago. “If he steps on himself, as he does each day,” said Schoen, “then these messages aren’t going to get through.”
Additional reporting by James Fontanella-Khan in Chicago
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