Trump says he’ll focus on issues. His allies are not holding their breath

Former President Donald Trump dialed into “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning for his first interview since Vice President Kamala Harris picked Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate.

“Talk about how you’re going to handle this on the campaign trail,” the friendly Fox host Ainsley Earhardt said to Trump. “Will you just really hone in on how they voted in the past?”

It was really more of a plea than a question.

“Well, I am,” Trump assured her. “I’m going to be doing that.”

The way Republicans see it, it should not be hard for Trump to pivot from President Joe Biden to this new Democratic ticket. All he has to do is hammer Harris and Walz for things they have said and done, to paint them as out-of-step with most Americans, on everything including policing, immigration and transgender policies.

But lately Trump keeps getting tangled up in distractions of his own making. He has gone on tangents about Harris’ biracial identity. He has picked fights with fellow Republicans. He has fantasized that Biden might somehow snatch back the nomination.

Many in Trump’s party find this all to be counterproductive, to say the least.

“The Harris-Walz ticket is the furthest left ticket in American history. They are a target-rich environment,” said Ben Shapiro, the right-wing media warrior. “All he has to do is focus the attack, to dump the war chest he’s accrued on this extremist ticket, to stick to a simple point: You were better off in 2019 than you are in 2024.”

Trump started to veer off message one week ago, when he questioned Harris’ identity as a Black woman before a roomful of Black journalists at a conference in Chicago. “He’s more comfortable with personality-driven attacks, rather than issue-driven attacks,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. “But given that Kamala’s a relative unknown, the policy- and issue-related attacks would get more traction right now.”

The message discipline issue compounded Saturday at a rally in Atlanta where Trump repeatedly attacked the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, for not going along with lies about the 2020 election having been stolen. “I was saddened to see two brothers in the same family argue,” said Jack Kingston, a former House Republican from Georgia and a Trump ally.

At times, it seems as if Trump has not even accepted his new political reality — that he is no longer in a race against Biden. On Tuesday, Trump wondered aloud in a post on Truth Social if there were any chance that Biden “CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination.”

“He spent four years preparing for a run against Joe Biden,” Newhouse said, “and it’s naturally tough to regain your footing.” He said Trump was now trying to do so “on the fly, with less than a hundred days left, and that’s an extraordinarily challenging effort.”

Trump’s campaign countered that “we have defined Kamala Harris as failed, weak and dangerously liberal,” according to Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung. “In numerous interviews and speeches, President Trump laid out a clear contrast of their disastrous platform versus his successful America First agenda. Whereas Kamala has ducked media interviews and refuses to engage with the press on a substantive level for over 17 days since Biden dropped out.”

Harris has not given a formal interview to the news media since she became her party’s standard-bearer.

Adding to the sense that Trump is flailing about, this week he has been testing out a new mocking nickname for his opponent, referring to Harris as “Kamabla.” It is a departure from the previous epithet he had chosen (“Laffin’ Kamala”), and nobody seems quite sure how to decipher it.

Asked if he understood what Trump meant by “Kamabla,” Kingston replied, “No.” As for the attacks on her racial identity? “I would stick to the price of groceries,” he said.

“All Trump has to do is talk about his positions, like he did in 2016,” said Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator who broke with Trump some years back, largely because of his inability to focus on the issues she cared about. “But, no, he’s going to spend the first 20 minutes of every rally attacking the popular Republican governor of Georgia or trying out stupid nicknames for Kamala.”

Coulter added that “Republicans who expected Trump to run a smart, disciplined campaign are going to be sorely disappointed.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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