Trump’s new rival may bring out his harshest instincts

Donald Trump and his political team spent nearly two years tailoring a campaign to defeat an old white male president who is conspicuously frail and who most Americans had told pollsters they doubted could handle another four-year term.

Suddenly, Trump faces a starkly different opponent: a vice president who is a Black woman, nearly 20 years younger, and who brings her own strengths and weaknesses but who adds new uncertainty into what had been a remarkably static race.

Allies of Vice President Kamala Harris have already telegraphed that she will run a campaign framed around a “prosecutor versus felon” theme, highlighting her experience as a prosecutor and underscoring the fact that Trump has been indicted in multiple jurisdictions and convicted of 34 felonies.

The prosecutor-versus-felon approach may appeal to undecided voters who had been sour on both Trump and President Joe Biden. It may also goad Trump, who reacts strongly to criticism, into resurrecting the language he has used against other Black female prosecutors, such as Letitia James in New York and Fani Willis in Georgia, both of whom he has called “racist” and attacked in personal terms.

In a preview of what’s to come, Harris made the prosecutor’s attack line explicit during an appearance Monday, describing her past as the district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California.

“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds: Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said.

Trump, for his part, has been trying to soften some of his harshest rhetoric about seeking vengeance on his rivals before the general election. But over many years, he has turned off a sizable proportion of college-educated voters and suburban women with his rhetoric on gender and race — and the Harris candidacy introduces the risk of Trump lashing out at her and further alienating those voters. Trump has a long history of attacking female rivals and critics in personal terms, usually describing them as mentally unstable or worse. He called Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, “that bitch” in front of officials in his own administration while he was president, according to the book “I Alone Can Fix It,” by Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. Trump’s use of the phrase was later confirmed to The New York Times.

In the case of Harris, the contempt is displayed in public and private. Trump has told people that she “speaks in rhyme” — a mocking reference to her occasional word-salad sentences that have gone viral on social media, have become mainstays on Fox News and have been lampooned on liberal comedy shows.

Publicly, Trump has described her as “nasty,” “crazy” and “disrespectful,” mocked her laugh, mispronounced her name and promoted a false claim that Harris is constitutionally ineligible to serve as vice president, echoing his racist “birther” campaign against Barack Obama.

In a post on Truth Social on Monday afternoon, Trump accused the news media of trying “to turn ‘Dumb as a Rock’ Kamala Harris from a totally failed and insignificant Vice President into a future ‘Great’ President. No, it just doesn’t work that way!”

A number of the fundamentals of this year’s contest still benefit Trump, according to Republican strategists, who see enthusiasm in the party’s base and antipathy toward Biden’s record as helping their nominee. Trump’s presidency has been viewed more favorably in hindsight than it was at the time, polling has showed. And his advisers question how Harris will perform on the national stage in a sustained campaign of her own, after her 2020 effort failed to make it all the way to the Iowa caucuses.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, called Harris “just as incompetent as Joe Biden and even more liberal. Not only does Kamala need to defend her support of Joe Biden’s failed agenda over the past four years, she also needs to answer for her own terrible weak-on-crime record in California.”

Trump had crossed paths with Harris long before they were rivals in 2020. He donated to her reelection campaign when she was California’s attorney general, contributing $5,000 in 2011 and $1,000 in 2013. At the time, Trump was facing a potential class action lawsuit in the state from people who claimed his for-profit Trump University business classes bilked them out of money.

Since then, Trump has attacked her savagely, particularly when she became Biden’s running mate in 2020.

“You know, I want to see the first woman president also, but I don’t want to see a woman president get into that position the way she’d do it — and she’s not competent,” Trump said in August 2020.

A month later, he declared, “People don’t like her. Nobody likes her. She could never be the first woman president. She could never be. That would be an insult to our country.”

Trump has insisted he is unconcerned about the change in the Democratic ticket and looking forward to the coming race.

But his campaign’s actions over the past few weeks cut against that confident posture. On Sunday, Trump, who has insisted he would debate Biden anytime and anywhere, appeared to try to change the terms of the second debate. On Truth Social, he posted that the debate should be moved to Fox News, a channel on which he receives favorable coverage, from the agreed-upon ABC.

Since Biden announced his decision Sunday to quit the race, Trump and his advisers have complained about all the money they’ve wasted running a giant campaign against a candidate who is no longer their opponent.

Jessica Mackler, president of the group EMILY’s List, which supports the campaigns of Democratic women who back abortion rights, described the new race as “a very different engagement for Donald Trump and one that he’s on the losing side of.”

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