The 2024 campaign will now turn on whether Trump can blunt Harris’ soaring start

CNN —

Donald Trump’s campaign, which has whiffed in its early attacks on Kamala Harris’ new presidential campaign, will grapple this week for a more effective foothold after the vice president transformed an election of stunning surprises.

The ex-president has deployed some of his most trusted political tools — targeting racial identity, creating alternative realities, flinging insults and gaslighting. On Sunday, for instance, he spread a new false conspiracy theory over the size of Harris’ rally crowd in Michigan last week. But his efforts to bring down his new adversary and her policy of ignoring his provocations have so far more highlighted his own liabilities than hers and emphasized the way Harris could offer a new choice for voters.

When the ex-president called Harris “dumb” at a Montana rally Friday night or falsely claimed last month that she “happened to turn Black,” he may have delighted his base voters. But those kinds of comments risk alienating women and swing-state voters, as well as reversing the gains he has made among minorities that he’d proudly highlighted for months. Trump’s campaign was also forced on Saturday to deny a report in The New York Times that he’d privately referred to Harris as a “b*tch” as he bemoaned her momentum.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz exit Air Force Force Two as they arrive at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on August 7, 2024.

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Trump’s undisciplined news conference last week and a weekend of venting also suggest that the Republican nominee is far from coming to terms with the shift in a race that seemed to be heading in his direction three