CNN
—
On the Sunday after the June 27 presidential debate, President Donald Trump’s top advisers went to bed expecting Democratic concerns about President Joe Biden’s performance to have subsided and for a fresh array of headlines to emerge at the start of the new week.
But the next morning, realizing the Democrats’ dire situation, they began planning early for an extraordinary scenario in which Biden would leave office.
In between preparations for the convention and the assassination attempt that shocked the nation, they were studying potential Democratic nominees, comparing Trump to potential successors, believing Vice President Kamala Harris to be the most likely successor and beginning to soft-launch further attacks on her.
Now, with Biden announcing he won’t run for reelection, the seeds of that effort are already emerging. Within hours of Biden dropping out of the race on Sunday and endorsing his vice president, the Trump campaign released a scathing statement tying Harris to his administration’s policies, while a cooperating super PAC has been buying airtime in several battleground states in an attempt to portray Harris to vulnerable voters as someone who has bolstered a clearly weakened Biden.
Trump also moved quickly to gain an advantage over whoever his next opponent is, suggesting that the next debate be moved from the agreed-upon host network, ABC, to the more familiar Fox News.
Trump posted on social media that Biden was “unfit to run for President and certainly not fit to hold office – and never has been!”
The Trump campaign’s three-week scramble to prepare for an unprecedented event may have begun as a contingency plan, but it has now become an urgent necessity. Over the past year, Trump has repeatedly asserted that he did not expect Biden to remain the candidate until November, but neither he nor his campaign have taken any serious steps to prepare for that outcome.
Instead, the Trump campaign organized a detailed campaign to defeat Biden, having already spent millions building models to predict outcomes in key battleground states, deploying sophisticated data manipulation, and preparing a propaganda offensive to contrast the two candidates. It was a campaign built on the assumption that Trump would be facing off against an 81-year-old man whose physical condition and mental acuity would pose significant obstacles and cause enough voters to ignore the Republican candidate’s many shortcomings.
Now, much of that work is obsolete, or at least needs to be rethought for a race utterly altered by recent events. Whether Democrats nominate Harris or pick someone else, Trump, the oldest candidate in major party history, will be one whose age is a concern for some voters.
“The real value[Harris]brings is that Democrats won’t have to worry about whether their candidate can meet minimum standards of job performance,” said a Republican strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “That means this is going to be a real race.”
For a while, Republicans were happy to watch the chaos unfold on the Democratic side, and Trump stayed quiet for a few weeks while Biden struggled to deal with the fallout. But it soon became widely recognized within the Trump camp that a Biden withdrawal would throw their own campaign into uncertainty.
As calls for Biden to resign reached a crescendo in early July, the Trump campaign began studying the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws to understand the internal procedures that would be followed if Biden resigned, according to a Trump campaign official.
The Trump campaign also privately stepped up and began testing new attacks against Harris, whom it has largely ignored since becoming vice president. That included sprinkling Trump’s speeches with new criticism of the California Democrat and urging surrogates of the former president to do the same, according to two senior Trump campaign advisers.
Some of these new attacks were on display at last week’s Republican National Convention, where Ms Harris was the second-most criticized Democrat on stage after Mr Biden.
Now that the time has come, the Trump campaign is planning a series of negative ads criticizing Harris’ record not only under the Biden administration but also her time as a prosecutor and attorney general in California, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. The messaging will be routed through the campaign and at least one super PAC aligned with the former president.
While polls show Harris is the best-known of the Democratic candidates likely to succeed Biden, Trump’s advisers and allies argue most Americans don’t know much about her, creating an opportunity to characterize her for the public.
MAGA Inc., the main pro-Trump super PAC, launched a new 30-second spot on Sunday that was first shared on social media, previewing the plan of attack. The accusation states that Harris “covered up Joe Biden’s apparent mental decline.” The ad also includes footage of Harris praising Biden’s performance as president, saying, “Our president is fit, healthy, tireless and energized and there is no doubt about the strength of the job we’ve done.”
The group, which has already spent $77 million so far on ads supporting Trump, announced plans to air ads in the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Trump campaign co-chairman Chris LaCivita suggested last week that the campaign intended to make Harris’ endorsement of Biden an issue, as the president’s performance in the months leading up to the debate brought concerns about Biden’s stamina to the forefront.
“Do you know how much tape there is on this?” LaCivita said Thursday at an event outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Similarly, Republicans have argued that if Biden decides he cannot serve another four years in office, he should step down immediately.
The Trump campaign and its allies also plan to make the case that Harris is the person in the administration responsible for the border crisis, a major theme of Republican messaging this year, after Biden nominated her as deputy secretary in 2021 to address the root causes of migration from Central America. They also plan to link her to the country’s inflation problem and are planning a crime message similar to the one they once prepared for Biden.
“For the last four years, she has collaborated with Biden’s open border and environmental fraud policies that have made housing and food prices soar,” Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump’s new running mate, said Sunday after Biden endorsed Harris. “She bears the burden of all of these failures.”
But it’s unclear whether a new face will appeal to voters who have for months told pollsters they fear a rematch of 2020. Many voters, including some who would have voted for Trump if he faced Biden, have deep-seated negative opinions of the former president and have expressed a desire to distance themselves from him.
Ms. Harris also has a chance to reinvigorate Democrats disillusioned with the Biden administration. One veteran Republican strategist said Mr. Trump should prepare Georgia to become competitive again, a state that had begun to seem out of reach for Democrats.
“Biden has struggled with black voters and young people,” the strategist said. “It seems to me like Kamala has a better chance of doing better with those demographics. The question is, by how much?”
Brian Bartlett, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Trump could face new headwinds in battleground states depending on who the Democratic vice presidential nominee is.
“There’s been some early warning signs for a while now, so I would have expected that they would be pretty prepared with their message, their opponents and so on,” Bartlett said. “The biggest potential challenge I see is whether (Harris) picks a running mate who can help her win some of the blue wall states and other key battleground states.”
Other names already being mentioned as potential vice presidential candidates include Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina.
The Trump campaign had been compiling a dossier on some of these people as possible successors, what one senior adviser called “a binder full of research.” Others they’ve studied include Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and congressional leaders.
But much of their focus in recent weeks has been on Harris, according to a second senior adviser, and they are also conducting internal polling to test how she fare against Trump.
Asked if the investigation had begun to compare Trump to other Democrats, Mr. LaCivita sounded exasperated last week: “We’re a competent organization. What on earth would you say?”
CNN’s David Wright contributed to this report.
