Trump Campaign Struggles to Adapt to Kamala Harris

Happy Tuesday! In what was likely our final game of the season, The Dispatch’s softball team rolled to an easy 30-11 victory last night.

And no, you shouldn’t read anything into the fact that, before today, we haven’t provided a softball update in almost two months.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris held a Situation Room meeting on Monday with the administration’s national security team ahead of an increasingly likely Iranian attack on Israel. An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman said its forces are ready to counter “any sudden threat,” as Iran seeks retaliation for two recent terrorist assassinations, including the killing of Hamas’ top political leader—Ismail Haniyeh—last week at a guesthouse in Iran’s capital city of Tehran. Iranian officials have already arrested more than a dozen intelligence and military officials—in addition to guesthouse workers—in connection to Haniyeh’s assassination at the heavily guarded facility. 
• Multiple outlets reported yesterday that several United States service members were injured on Monday after two rockets struck inside Al-Asad Air Base, a military base owned by Iraq but where many U.S. military personnel operate and are stationed. It remains unclear what entity was responsible for the attack—and where the rockets were launched from—but initial reporting has linked the attack to an Iranian-backed group. 
• The United Nations confirmed on Monday that nine male employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), the agency responsible for distributing aid in Palestinian territories, were possibly involved in Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel. “For nine people, the evidence was sufficient to conclude that they may have been involved in the seventh of October attacks,” said U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq, adding that all nine employees will be fired. “For us, any participation in the attacks is a tremendous betrayal of the sort of work that we are supposed to be doing on behalf of the Palestinian people.” The extent to which the nine men may have been involved in Hamas’ attacks is either currently unknown or yet to be disclosed publicly.
• Vice President Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, will reportedly announce her running mate later this morning after narrowing down her shortlist to two governors: Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro and Minnesota’s Tim Walz. Politico reported Monday that Harris’ campaign plans to announce her running mate in a social media video this morning ahead of a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, tonight.
• Stock markets slid worldwide on Monday, with the Nasdaq Composite, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and S&P 500—the three major market indexes in the United States—all falling by more than 2.5 percent and the latter two indices experiencing their worst day in nearly two years. Japan suffered one of the more severe market declines, as the Nikkei 225—an index of Tokyo’s Stock Exchange—tumbled more than 12 percent on Monday, the largest single-day drop in the index in more than three decades. Such downturns seem poised to reverse today, however, with the Nikkei 225 surging 11 percent early Tuesday morning and U.S. stock futures following suit.
• A federal judge on Monday ruled that Google broke antitrust laws in its pursuit of a monopoly over online search, deciding in favor of the Justice Department and 17 states that had sued the tech company in 2020. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in a nearly 300-page decision that could have widespread ramifications for the tech industry. Mehta did not outline potential remedies in his ruling, but such penalties could range from a requirement to stop certain business practices to a forced breakup of the company’s search business. Google plans to appeal the ruling, with Kent Walker, the company’s president of global affairs, saying in a statement: “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.”
• At least five people, including two children, died on Monday after Hurricane Debby, now downgraded to a tropical storm, made landfall in Florida on Monday morning, leaving hundreds of thousands without electricity as heavy rains and winds pummeled the southeast. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 61 counties and ordered 3,000 state National Guard troops to respond. Meteorologists expect Debby to move northward up the Atlantic seaboard for the remainder of the week. 
• American forces on Monday completed their withdrawal from Niger, with the U.S. military relinquishing control of its last military base in the central African country about five months after Niger’s ruling junta—which assumed power in a July 2023 coup—had ordered all U.S. military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees to leave. The now-defunct military base was opened in 2018, with the federal government spending approximately $280 million—including construction and operational expenses—on the outpost seen by some senior military officials as essential for counterterrorism operations in the region. The handful of American troops remaining in Niger are stationed at the U.S. embassy in the country, and are expected to depart by September 15, a deadline previously agreed upon by U.S. and Nigerien government officials. 
• Bangladesh’s authoritarian Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country on Monday after anti-government protesters calling for her ouster besieged the capital of Dhaka, storming and looting her official residence and the nation’s parliament building. Hasina, who had led Bangladesh since 2009, narrowly escaped the violent protesters, leaving via helicopter and airplane into India with members of her family and entourage. Following Hasina’s resignation, army chief Waker-Uz-Zaman announced the formation of an interim government. Monday’s events came after months of student-led demonstrations—which Hasina’s government had brutally repressed—calling for more merit-based opportunities for coveted civil service positions. 
• Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes on Monday agreed to drop criminal charges against former Trump lawyer and ally Jenna Ellis in the Arizona fraudulent slate of electors case—brought against nearly 20 Trump allies in April—in exchange for Ellis’ cooperation with state prosecutors in the case. Eleven of the defendants—including Ellis—were initially charged with nine criminal violations for posing as official presidential electors for Arizona in 2020, while the charges for the other seven were and remain redacted.

Trump’s Undisciplined Campaign 

It didn’t take long after U.S. markets opened on Monday—with the Dow Jones Industrial Average taking a nearly 900-point hit at the opening bell—for former President Donald Trump to seize on a new line of attack against Vice President Kamala Harris.

“KAMALA CRASH,” he posted on Truth Social at 10:01 a.m. ET.

That must have gotten the wheels turning in his mind, because just seconds later—at 10:02 a.m. ET—he truthed: “TRUMP CASH vs. KAMALA CRASH!” Throughout the day on Monday, he posted a flurry of truths that were variations on that theme. “REMEMBER,” the former president asserted in one such post, “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”

The Trump campaign has spent the last two weeks trying to find its sea legs after President Joe Biden—against whom it had calibrated its entire strategy—announced he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Harris to succeed him. The former president and his team have failed to land on a coherent line of attack against the vice president, even as Trump reverts to form and turns his fire on other Republicans. 

Trump’s team, led by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, had crafted their campaign strategy specifically to beat Biden, whose age and mental acuity problems made him a gaffe machine unable to land blows against Trump or ably defend himself against attacks. The approach depended on a disciplined Trump going after Biden relentlessly and taking control of the narrative of the race. “Wiles and LaCivita have never been focused on beating Biden at the margins,” Tim Alberta wrote in The Atlantic the week before Biden dropped out. “Rather, their plan has been to bully him, to humiliate him, optimizing Trump’s campaign to unleash such a debilitating assault on the president’s age and faculties that he would be ruined before a single vote is cast this fall.” 

That strategy fell apart when Harris was effectively crowned the presumptive nominee in just a matter of hours after Biden dropped out, turning the race on its head. Though the dynamic duo of Wiles and LaCivita have insisted that Harris carries much the same baggage as her predecessor, that hasn’t been evident in the last two weeks. “I think they were caught off guard. I think they were surprised,” one Republican senator told The Hill of the Trump campaign’s reaction to Harris’ strength right out of the gate. “I think there was shock when the Democrats revived [their party] really quickly” and rallied around Harris.

When Biden dropped out on July 21, the RealClearPolitics polling average had Biden polling at 44.8 percent to Trump’s 47.8 percent. Biden hadn’t led Trump in that average in more than a year of campaigning. As soon as Harris took over at the top of the ticket, she began to close that gap. Just yesterday, the vice president overtook Trump in that average—though only by a scant two-tenths of a point. But, in a CBS News poll out this weekend, Harris led Trump by 1 percentage point nationally and by 2 percentage points with third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West in the mix. 

Indeed, some of Trump’s campaign decisions—like picking Vance to be his running mate—were already baked in before Biden dropped out. But they’re seeming less politically savvy than they did when the former president seemed to be on a clear path to victory. “There’s no good electoral argument for putting Vance on the ticket,” Nick wrote before Vance was announced as the pick. “Vance simply helps Trump further lock down the sort of populists who have been locked down for years.” 

Though Vance’s political career is relatively young—he only formally entered politics in 2021—there are still plenty of unflattering comments in his past to have filled the airwaves for days. In the most virulent of those moments, he claimed in a 2021 interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that government is “effectively run in this country—via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs—by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He pointed to Harris, who has two step-children, Transportation Secretary* Pete Buttigieg, at the time going through adoption proceedings and now a father of two, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York as examples of such figures. 

Last month, instead of making the case for his running mate or their combined ticket, Vance had to try to walk back the remarks. “This is not about criticizing people who, for various reasons, didn’t have kids,” he told Megyn Kelly. “This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family.” 

An able pivot, perhaps, if he’d left it there. “Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment,” he said later. “I’ve got nothing against cats, I’ve got nothing against dogs, I’ve got one dog at home, and I love him, Megyn.” 

Even Trump supporters seem a little unsure about Vance, who was vocally anti-Trump when he first burst on the scene as the author of his New York Times bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. “I don’t know if I trust him, to be honest. He was totally against Trump,” Marianne Rosato of Clinton, New Jersey, told TMD at a Trump rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, last week. “I hope he’s not another [former Vice President Mike] Pence, where he was pushed on Trump to run with him, and he’ll be a backstabber.”

The former president was reportedly leaning toward selecting North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum before Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr., pressed hard for Vance. He acquiesced, but has so far seemed unimpressed. “Historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference,” Trump said in response to a question from a panel at the National Association for Black Journalists (NABJ) convention last week about whether Vance would be ready on day one of another Trump administration. “You’re voting for the president. You can have a vice president who’s outstanding in every way, and I think J.D. is. I think that all of them would have been. But you’re not voting that way. You’re voting for the president. You’re voting for me.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement of his running mate. 

It was also at the NABJ conference that Trump took a new attack line against Harris for a test run. “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,” Trump claimed of Harris, who is the daughter of a black Jamaican-American father and an Indian mother. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?”

The remarks—on which Trump and the campaign have since doubled down—seem increasingly like part of a deliberate line of attack against Harris who has claimed both aspects of her heritage at various points in her life and career. The comments also ran in direct opposition to pleas from House Republican leaders last month to their members not to refer to Harris as a “DEI” pick. “This has nothing to do with race,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said last month. “It has to do with the competence of the person running for president, the relative strength of the two candidates and what ideas they have on how to solve America’s problems. And I think in that comparison, we’ll win in a landslide.” 

So much for that. 

Even still, the discussion of Harris’ race is just one line of effort in a scattershot approach to attacking Harris that has lacked both discipline and coherence—something the criticisms of Biden’s age had in spades. The first major ad the campaign put out targeting Harris last week, for example, focuses on her record on immigration as the Biden administration’s “border czar.” 

But Trump has a hard time staying focused on Democrats at all, much less executing a single strategy against Harris. Seemingly out of nowhere on Saturday, the former president turned his fire on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who has indicated he will support the Republican ticket in the upcoming election. “Brian Kemp should focus his efforts on fighting Crime, not fighting Unity and the Republican Party!” Trump said on Truth Social. “His Crime Rate in Georgia is terrible, his Crime Rate in Atlanta is the worst, and his Economy is average. He should be seeking UNITY, not Retribution, especially against the man that got him the Nomination through Endorsement and, without whom, he could never have beaten Stacey Abrams. He and his wife didn’t think he could win. I said, ‘I’m telling you you’re going to win.’ Then he won, he was happy, and his wife said, ‘Thank you Sir, we’ll never be able to make it up to you!’ Now she says she won’t Endorse me, and is going to ‘write in Brian Kemp’s name.’ Well, I don’t want her Endorsement, and I don’t want his.”

The former president continued his tirade against Kemp during an Atlanta rally Saturday night, calling him “very bad for the Republican party.” Trump lost Georgia to Biden in 2020 and likely isn’t doing his campaign any favors this time around by picking a fight with the state’s popular Republican governor. 

“My focus is on winning this November and saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats—not engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past,” Kemp tweeted on Saturday. “You should do the same, Mr. President, and leave my family out of it.”

Worth Your Time 

• How difficult is it for Americans held captive abroad to reintegrate? The Washington Post’s former Tehran bureau chief, Jason Rezaian, who was held prisoner in Iran, described in the Post what the three Americans freed from Russia last week may face. “When I returned home from Iran in 2016 after being imprisoned for nearly a year and a half, I found that the IRS had charged me with thousands of dollars in penalties for not filing my taxes on time,” he wrote. “My credit rating was also shattered. Many bills that had been set for autopay were declined and sent to collection while I was away.” Rezaian says future returned prisoners should not face the difficulties he suffered. “The U.S. government can do more to support the social reintegration of returned hostages. … As a free society, we owe the victims of this abuse more than our support and empathy. Considerable resources were expended in the effort to negotiate their release. It is important now to invest more to return them to normal life.” 
• Writing in Foreign Affairs, Colin P. Clarke and Lucas Webber highlighted the re-emerging, global threat posed by the Islamic State—especially in a world divided by great power competition. “ISIS-K and other terrorist groups exploit the seams between great powers,” they wrote. “Not only do they avoid detection when countries do not share information, but they also deliberately launch attacks that exacerbate sectarian tensions, making it even more difficult for governments to prevent further violence. Terrorist activity is a global problem, as ISIS-K’s newly ambitious strategy shows, and counterterrorism efforts must be global, as well. As long as intelligence agencies remain wary of cooperating or passing along critical information about this shared threat, they will cede the initiative to the groups that would do their countries harm.”

Presented Without Comment

CNN: [Kamala Harris’ Husband Doug] Emhoff Acknowledges Affair During First Marriage After Tabloid Report

Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff acknowledged Saturday in a statement to CNN that he had an affair during his first marriage after the alleged details of the relationship were published by a British tabloid.

…

The statement comes after the Daily Mail reported that Emhoff had a relationship with one of his then-young daughter’s teachers, which resulted in the end of his first marriage.

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The Daily Mail reported that the woman became pregnant and that, according to a close friend, she “did not keep the child.” The woman, whom CNN is not naming, did not return a voicemail on Saturday afternoon looking for comment.

Also Presented Without Comment

Politico: Usha Vance Calls [Her Husband J.D. Vance’s] ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ Comments a ‘Quip’

In the (Olympic) Zeitgeist

Pole vaulter Mondo Duplantis—who wins gold in our hearts for coolest name, even if he loses points for competing for his mother’s native Sweden, instead of the U.S., where he was born—set an Olympic record on Monday night in Paris. Then, in the very next jump, he broke his own world record with a jump of 6.25 meters. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Kevin argued (🔒) that Israel is already in a regional war, the Dispatch Politics team reported on two key Michigan congressional races and the Missouri gubernatorial contest ahead of Tuesday’s primary elections, and Nick explained why he believes Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is the obviously correct choice to serve as Kamala Harris’ running mate.
• On the podcasts: Adaam was joined on The Dispatch Podcast by Yedioth Ahronoth reporter Nadav Eyal, former Israeli lawmaker Einat Wilf, and David French to discuss the future balance of power in the Middle East. And on today’s episode of Advisory Opinions, Sarah and David break down David’s recent interview with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch before being joined by Keith Whittington to discuss the law professor’s new book on academic freedom.
• On the site: Andy Smarick breaks down what’s actually in Project 2025—and why it may not actually matter all that much. 

Let Us Know

What do you think is Harris’ greatest weakness as a candidate? Are you surprised that Trump hasn’t yet been able to settle on a strategy for how best to go after her?

Correction, August 6, 2024: This newsletter originally misidentified Pete Buttigieg as Treasury Secretary rather than Transportation Secretary.