When Donald Trump held a news conference last week, ostensibly to hit Vice President Kamala Harris for not yet having held one of her own, he said something revealing about how her sudden climb up the Democratic ticket had shaped his own campaign for the presidency — or not.

“I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all,” the former president said.

That seems true.

For decades, Trump has operated with an instinctive political style that he honed in the tribal and combative world of New York City politics, one that has taken him from Queens to Manhattan to the White House (and out of it).

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Those instincts are being freshly tested as he struggles to settle on a message against Harris.

Instead of resetting his campaign after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Trump has spent the past 3 1/2 weeks grumbling about Harris’ crowd sizes, grousing about Biden’s exit and lobbing a barrage of politically risky insults about Harris’ race, first name and intelligence.

“It’s combative, it tends to be highly personal, and it tends to be highly negative,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political strategist in New York who has observed Trump for decades.

But with polls showing him slipping behind Harris in key battleground states, some Republicans want him to swap instincts for strategy.

“Quit whining about her,” former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, an erstwhile Trump opponent who endorsed him this year, said in a Fox News interview Tuesday night, adding, “I want this campaign to win.”

A Road Map, Rejected

Two days after Biden dropped out of the race and Harris announced she was running for president, David McCormick, a Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, posted an ad on social platform X excoriating her for positions she took while running in the 2020 presidential race. Some in his party saw it as a clear road map for campaigning against a California Democrat they believed would be vulnerable on issues like inflation and immigration.

Trump, apparently, had other ideas.

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From his first posts on Truth Social through the campaign rallies and interviews he has held since that day, he has made a point of both attacking Biden and complaining that his withdrawal from the race is deeply unfair. He has insulted Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of a state, Georgia, he dearly needs to win. And he has often fired conflicting attacks Harris’ way.

Is she a legal mastermind behind the criminal cases against him, drawing on her background as a prosecutor, as he claimed on July 24? Or, was she “really bad” at that job, as he also claimed?

Is she a “lunatic,” more liberal than Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as Trump claimed at a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on July 28? Or is she a “phony,” as he described her during a two-hour livestream on X on Monday?

On July 31, he took aim at Harris’ race, bizarrely suggesting that the Black daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica “made a turn and she became a Black person” before bragging about the interview on his social media site. The timeworn tactic of “othering” continued as he repeatedly mispronounced and misspelled her name, saying onstage last week that he “couldn’t care less” how it’s pronounced. He has repeatedly insulted her intelligence and, at a campaign rally Wednesday in Asheville, North Carolina, said Democrats had elevated her “because they decided to get politically correct.”

It’s an approach consistent with the campaigns Trump saw in New York in the days of Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, Sheinkopf said, that played on racial stereotypes and sometimes pit different ethnic or racial groups against one another.

But the approach risks turning off voters of color and women — as well as distracts from the efforts his campaign staff is making through its advertisements to frame the campaign around issues.

“The Trump campaign is about Trump,” Sheinkopf said, and now he’s fighting somebody “he doesn’t know how to hit.”

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‘His Message Gets Through’

Trump’s tactics certainly have their defenders.

“It’ll never fit the criteria in some political science books,” said Dave Carney, a Republican strategist who leads a Trump-aligned super political action committee called Preserve America. “In reality, his message gets through.”

But other Republicans are growing deeply frustrated that he is not focusing more narrowly on what they see as Harris’ weaknesses on policy.

“He lacks self-control. He lacks discipline,” said Eric Levine, a Republican donor who supported Haley during the primary but says he will vote for Trump. “There are all these things Donald Trump should be talking about and instead he’s talking about everything else.”

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Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, warned that Trump’s attacks on Harris threaten the “permission structure” he had been building for Republicans outside his base to support him.

“You have this very strange victimhood and grievance, which can, when channeled well by Trump, be effective. And right now it is actually actively harming him, because he’s marinating in that, rather than actually trying to drive a campaign message and define Harris,” Donovan said.

In his view, the tables have turned mightily since June, when Democrats were looking at a close race and worrying that their candidate — then Biden — would not perform as well as he needed to.

Now, he said, it’s Republicans who feel that way.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jess Bidgood/Haiyun Jiang
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