Trump’s new playbook for attacking Harris is the old “liberal” playbook, but on steroids

For the first time in the presidential election campaign Donald Trump is starting to fall behind — edging out Kamala Harris in funding and trailing the vice president in some battleground state polls.

Special attacks against are gone President Joe Biden From his age to his family and his gallery of missteps and confusions, they have had to decline.

Now, inside Trump’s campaign, his advisers are deploying a full messaging strategy with a familiar theme: Attack Harris as the most extreme liberal caricature they can muster.

And for at least one day, the former president on Wednesday stuck to the script.

“You know, nobody knew how radical left he was, but he’s a smarter version of him, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said Wednesday on Fox & Friends, upending Harris’ pick for Minnesota governor. Tim Walz as a runner. “He’s probably about the same as Bernie Sanders. He’s probably more like Bernie Sanders.

Trump added: “This is a flag that would like this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”

Regardless of who Harris chose as his running mate, Trump advisers planned to brand them as extremists, said a campaign adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. In the final days of the Harris selection process, the Trump campaign had focused on three finalists in particular – Walz, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly.

The attacks highlight a central calculation of the Trump campaign: that by casting Harris as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal, they can stifle his appeal to swing voters in Rust Belt and Sun Belt states who will decide the outcome of the campaign. election. And in the campaign’s portrayal of Harris and Walz — a former football coach and National Guard member from Central America — as extremists, the GOP’s commitment to the “liberal” mantra has rarely been so clear.

“The Harris-Walz ticket is the most radical in history,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an informal adviser to Trump, told POLITICO. “We are winning an issue-specific, ideologically focused campaign by a significant margin.”

Whether Trump can stick to that message remains questionable — it would mark a departure from his approach to the race since Harris replaced Biden as his opponent. In recent days, Trump has questioned Harris’s black identity, smeared her as “low IQ” and, during a visit to Georgia, clashed with the swing state’s popular governor, Brian Kemp.

But Trump’s campaign is trying to catch on to the “liberal” moniker.

Following Walz’s selection on Tuesday, the Trump campaign cast Harris as a “San Francisco liberal” and Walz as a “West Coast wannabe.” The next day, the pro-Trump MAGA Inc. super PAC released a TV ad calling Harris a “dangerous liberal.”

Trump has called Harris and Walz “the most radical left-wing couple in American history” on Truth Social, while his own running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, has leveled criticism at his Democratic counterpart.

“This decision to pick Tim Walz is another sign that he doesn’t care what the American people think,” Vance said Tuesday night on Fox News’ “Hannity.” “He is only doing this to obey the far-left radicals of his own party.”

Republicans reinforce the message.

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro called Walz “the Marxist Don Rickles.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Walz an “Ilhan Omar-style Democrat,” referring to the liberal Minnesota congressman. And on POLITICO Live in New York on Wednesday, Rep. Andrew Garbarino (RN.Y.) said Harris had “doubled down on the ultraliberal choice.”

Harris has taken a progressive stance on some important issues, including the Green New Deal. But he has also frustrated progressive members of his party, including his work as a prosecutor and his move away from Medicare for All midway through his 2019 presidential campaign.

Walz, on the other hand, has undergone something of an ideological shift since winning a congressional seat in 2006. He embraced some socially liberal policies, although he generally leaned more toward bipartisan and centrist legislation while representing a red district in Congress. But after exchanging his congressional badge for a key to the Minnesota governor’s mansion, he began promoting more progressive policies in the state.

His more recent approach is exactly what Republicans are banking on, including his executive order that made Minnesota the first state to protect access to gender-affirming treatment. Republicans have also slammed him for his military record and his response to protests in Minneapolis following the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

But generally, it’s the “liberal” tag that the Trump campaign is working hardest to apply to the Harris-Walz ticket.

“They can’t be let go of their previous liberal positions that they’re desperately trying to escape,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist who worked on the presidential campaign of South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

It’s unclear how effectively — and consistently — Trump will be able to prosecute the case.

Catching the offense, Gorman said, “requires discipline and the ability to deliver the message consistently.”

Jeff Coltin contributed to this report.