It’s Instincts Over Strategy for Trump

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).

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

Instead of resetting his campaign after President Biden dropped out of the race, Trump has spent the past three and a half weeks grumbling about Harris’s crowd sizes, grousing about Biden’s exit and lobbing a barrage of politically risky insults about Harris’s 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 on Tuesday night, adding, “I want this campaign to win.”