Trump will need a new line that defuses the allegations against him and tars Harris as just another of his monomaniacal pursuers.
Democrats have spent the last month salivating over Kamala Harris’s potential as a candidate who could prosecute the case against Donald Trump — not the arguments against Trump’s suitability for the office he seeks but the allegations leveled against him in court cases concluded and yet to come.
Since Harris assumed the reins of her party from Joe Biden, her campaign has taken a defensive posture. It reintroduced its candidate to voters in positive, biographical ways, and it hid from whatever scrutiny a disinterested press largely declined to apply to her. Harris spent those weeks safely parked behind an earthen dam, but that phase of the campaign is now behind us. Harris previewed her campaign’s offensive strategy in her speech at the close of the Democratic nominating convention. And while there are risks in exposing herself to take the fight to the Trump campaign, the foretaste of her strategy should concern Republicans.
“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” the relevant passage of Harris’s speech began. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” What followed was a crisp, staccato articulation of some of the former president’s biggest liabilities:
Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes. When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers. When politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help, he did the opposite — he fanned the flames. And now, for an entirely different set of crimes, he was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans, and separately — and separately found liable for committing sexual abuse. And consider, consider what he intends to do if we give him power again. Consider his explicit intent to set free violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol.
Republicans would be making a mistake if they wrote this off because Trump’s most dedicated supporters have already dismissed his criminal convictions and alleged violations as an outgrowth of an illegitimate “lawfare” campaign. The persuadable voters they need to win this election are not committed to that rationalization — by definition, insofar as they can be persuaded. And what Harris is attempting here is persuasion.
In rattling off the allegations against Trump with relative precision — guilty of fraud, liable for sexual assault, and accused of conspiring against the good working order of the federal government — Harris sets the stage for a procedural drama. And, if network television’s staples are any indication, Americans cannot seem to get enough procedural dramas. What is Trump’s response to all this? It’s hard to say. It appears his campaign is struggling to move on from Joe Biden, whose presence in the race all but neutralized the vulnerability presented by Trump’s legal woes.
Who can blame the Trump campaign for resenting their circumstances? Biden had made this all so easy. His scofflaw son. His sponging brother. Burisma. The shell companies. The IRS whistle-blowers. “The big guy.” The “impeachable offenses.” It was all there — everything Trump could want to muddy the waters and limit his exposure by confusing voters about who the offender in this race really was. In much the same way Trump denuded the sting of the charge that he was a confidence man in 2016 because his opponent was similarly regarded, Trump could sow confusion about the “Biden crime family.” I’m not the criminal! You’re the criminal!
So much for that. Kamala Harris’s vulnerability is not rooted in the sense that she, too, is criminally corrupt — not, at least, for voters who don’t assume that all politicians are corrupt in that way. Her weakness is in her inauthenticity. She’s a chameleon willing to tell whomever she is talking to precisely what they want to hear. Insofar as we know who she is, the persona she has fabricated for this campaign is not the real Kamala Harris. She cannot be trusted.
But that doesn’t dispel the charge that Trump has and will continue to play fast and loose with the law. And this tactic is not purely retrospective. Harris concluded this segment of her speech with a future-oriented warning about the danger Trump poses in office:
His explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents and anyone he sees as the enemy. His explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens. Consider, consider the power he will have, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court just ruled that he would be immune from criminal prosecution. Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States. Not to improve your life, not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.
How will the Trump campaign respond to all this? He can, and likely will, maintain that all the allegations against him, those proven and pending alike, are unjust — motivated prosecutions by an illegitimate system that would persecute you as surely as it is persecuting him. But voters have been hearing Trump make that case for months. To the extent that it is persuasive, it has likely already won over all the voters who are receptive to it. Trump will need a new line that defuses the allegations against him and tars Harris as just another of his monomaniacal pursuers.
But he doesn’t have that line down yet. Indeed, he hasn’t even really toyed with one that is tailored to the Harris campaign. There’s still time in this cycle to craft and promulgate a narrative that has the intended effect. For now, however, it’s not at all clear how Trump intends to navigate the minefield he’s set for himself.