Trump campaigns on defense as he plans second attention-grabbing press conference

Donald Trump announced Wednesday morning that he would host a press conference this week — his second in seven days, after a previous one said little of substance.

The Republican nominee for president has called to meet the press on Thursday at his Bedminster club in New Jersey, hoping to avoid a slew of negative headlines that followed last week’s, where he repeated previouslies and offered nothing new.

The announcment comes as he was in North Carolina attempting to head offwhat appears to be a Kamala Harris surge that has put a number of red-leaning swing states back into sudden contention.

Trump, now almost one month out from the GOP convention, once planned to storm through the rest of the summer pummeling ex-opponent Joe Biden all the way, riding on a wave of support buoyed by a shocking assassination attempt and the four-day Trumpfest that was the GOP convention in July.

Instead, he enters mid-August facing a massively shaken-up campaign. Biden is no longer his opponent, having dropped out and endorsed his vice president, while Harris has roundly consolidated the Democratic field and is heading into her own party’s convention with a Democratic Party more unified than it has been at any time through the past two presidential election cycles.

Her selection of Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her running mate has only furthered to fuel her momentum as the affable midwestern politician has fallen into the role of attacking Harris’s opponents, Trump and running mate JD Vance, with ease.

Now, as Trump plots his second attempt to regain a positive national spotlight (or at least transfer some negative attention to Harris). The ex-president rallied on Wednesday in North Carolina, a state where he won in the past