I have a New York Times op-ed today giving, like so many others, unsolicited advice to Donald Trump. But my advice isn’t just to focus more on the issues. I think that is necessary, but not sufficient to the anti-Harris case:
The Obama team hammered Mitt Romney on the issues in 2012, but pretty much every policy argument went back to the core contention that he was a heartless, out-of-touch capitalist who valued the bottom line more than people. That ended up being the winning argument of the campaign.
By the same token, Mr. Trump isn’t going to beat Ms. Harris by scoring points in the debate over price controls or the border.
Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that Ms. Harris is weak, a phony, and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class. The scattershot Trump attacks on Harris need to be refocused on these character attributes.
Take, for example, her refusal so far to do sit-down interviews (although perhaps one is coming before the end of the month). I doubt many actual swing voters care about this much, unless it can be connected to a broader argument about her weakness, i.e., “She won’t do serious sit-down interviews because she is too weak and scared, and do we really want a president trying to handle a crisis in the Taiwan straits who can’t handle unscripted questions from a docile press corps?”
I don’t expect Trump to ever get into the details of any policy debate, but this is the kind of anti-Harris case he could easily make, and I believe it would be effective.