The Democratic nominee will be in for a tough ride given the intensity, professionalism, and doggedness of this year’s Trump operation.
Milwaukee — Back in February 2021, longtime Donald Trump pollster John McLaughlin met with the president in the wake of his second impeachment. Morale was low. Republicans in Washington were reeling from Joe Biden’s nail-biter victory, and the storming of the U.S. Capitol that followed was still fresh in the minds of many lawmakers and donors who were already dreading the prospect of yet another hypothetical Trump–Biden rematch in 2024.
But even then, Trump’s base wasn’t ready to let him go. “I told him that two-thirds of Republicans wanted him to run again. I don’t think he understood how important that was,” McLaughlin recalled in an interview last week with National Review. “He wasn’t certain if he was going to run, and if somebody else could have beaten Biden, he might have allowed them to do that.”
He launched his 2024 reelection campaign in November 2022 and won the GOP primary in a landslide a little less than a year and a half later. Then came the victory lap: Five days after he survived an assassination attempt during a rally in Butler, Pa., Trump departed the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee feeling jubilant about his prospects of defeating Joe Biden in November.
On Sunday, everything changed. The campaign, extraordinarily effective in quashing Trump’s GOP-primary rivals and prosecuting the case against Biden, is now in uncharted territory after the 81-year-old incumbent announced in a social-media statement that he will drop out of the race.
With his own base firmly allied behind him, Trump’s immediate task is to convince swing voters that they ought to send him back to the White House over whomever replaces Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
The leading candidate to win the nomination is 59-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris, who scored Biden’s endorsement on Sunday and, aside from self-help author Marianne Williamson, is the only declared Democratic presidential candidate as of this morning. Other challengers could emerge in the coming days, though it would be difficult for any prospective candidate to overcome her front-runner status given Biden’s endorsement, her identity as the first black and Indian-American vice president in American history, and the campaign fundraising apparatus she inherited the day Biden dropped out.
The GOP attacks on her will be brutal. Over the next couple of weeks, the Trump campaign and its allied super PACs will continue to hammer Harris for covering up the president’s infirmities in the years leading up to the June 27 debate, her word salads on the stump, and voters’ long-running disapproval of the Biden-Harris agenda. If she wins the nomination, Republicans will likely spend the months leading up to the election skewering her for the record number of illegal border-crossings that have occurred under an administration that tapped her early on to lead its “diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”
Publicly, Republicans spent the days leading up to Biden’s dropout announcement insisting that Trump will win in November no matter the Democratic nominee.
“It’s the policies that are the problem,” Representative Mike Lawler told National Review on the convention floor on Thursday evening. “The record inflation they gave us, an open border they gave us, one international crises after the next. That is their record. And they have to defend that to the American people regardless of whether it’s Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or if they throw her under the bus and go with somebody else.”
Biden’s replacement is in for a tough ride. There is a degree of intensity, professionalism, and doggedness to this year’s Trump operation that was missing in prior cycles, scores of Republican lawmakers, state chairmen, and operatives told National Review last week.
“It’s a very different campaign. It’s more experienced, and it’s more determined,” said McLaughlin, the Trump pollster. But more important, he added: “I’ve never seen him as determined.”
“I give enormous credit to Susie Wiles because the president is a free spirit,” says longtime confidante Roger Stone, a reference to the veteran political operative who helped Trump win Florida in prior cycles. “He’s not a politician, he doesn’t think like one, he pretty much makes his own decisions. But she has brought order out of chaos.”
Yet the race is far from over. Even if the political winds are currently blowing in Trump’s favor, the outcome of the next few months will depend on how the GOP nominee carries himself on the campaign trail against a still unknown Democratic ticket.
To win, the often unpredictable former president will likely need to run a disciplined campaign, scale back the divisive campaign rhetoric, and heed the advice of an inner circle of experienced campaign advisers who have consistently shown they are three steps ahead of the competition. One of the smartest tactical decisions the Trump campaign made this cycle was choosing to ignore and counterprogram the Republican primary debates, prompting his own rivals to rip each other to shreds in his absence and driving up anticipation to the June 27 general-election debate that ended up sealing Biden’s fate.
Aside from some rogue social media posts and a couple of campaign appearances following that debate, Trump laid lower than usual, allowing the Democrats to descend into disarray over Biden’s performance. “One of the most brilliant moves by him in the campaign was — Biden’s imploding and he kept quiet,” former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker told National Review in Milwaukee last week. And yet Trump’s 90-minute stemwinder of a convention speech and incendiary reaction to Biden’s decision to drop out suggest that his relative post-debate self-discipline may have been a one-off, even after a harrowing brush with death.
Only time will tell whether the GOP nominee tempers his own rhetoric and how much it will even matter to swing voters who are used to his antics. Meantime here in Milwaukee, days before Biden announced his decision to step aside, Trump’s supporters were already bracing themselves for a general-election campaign that they suspected would look very different very soon.
“The thing is, currently, he’s running against a ghost, right?” Nebraska delegate Sue Greenwald told National Review in the convention hall on Thursday night, three days before Biden suspended his 2024 campaign. “We don’t know who’s running the country. And so if he’s running against an actual person, that would be an experience that hasn’t happened yet.”