Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate August 8, 2024 in Palm Beach, Florida.
Joe Raedle |
Former President Donald Trump is facing a wave of demands from his Republican supporters that he should focus his political attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris on conceptual criticism and tone down his personal insults and conspiracy theories.
“The way forward is to focus on policy. Those are three words that I think are a path to success for the Republican Party: focus on policy,” former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said on NPR on Tuesday.
“I think Donald Trump has a good case on all of these issues, and I think he and the Republican Party would do well to focus on the policy differences,” said Ramaswamy, who endorsed Trump after withdrawing his own candidacy for the White House earlier this year.
“The formula for success for President Trump is very clear: It’s less insults, more insights and that political contrast,” Kellyanne Conway, a former Trump White House adviser, said in an interview with Fox News on Monday.
Conway, who managed Trump’s successful 2016 campaign, appeared with his former counterpart Larry Kudlow, who also had advice for Trump: “Don’t veer off topic, don’t call them stupid and don’t call them all kinds of swear words, stick to the topic.”
Appeals like these from loyal Trump supporters have been heard in Republican circles in recent days as the party grapples with the new dynamics of a presidential campaign against Harris, three weeks after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
As Trump tries to change his stance, his arguments against Harris often degenerate into personal attacks, including false claims about her race, insults about her intelligence and comments about her appearance. He has also promoted false conspiracy theories about the crowds at Harris’s large rallies.
“When Trump attacks Harris personally rather than politically, Harris’ support goes up among swing voters, especially women. That’s just a fact right now,” Peter Navarro, a former Trump White House aide, said Monday on the conservative WarRoom podcast.
Navarro is a loyal Trump ally who recently served four months in federal prison for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena as part of the investigation into the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
“This campaign cannot be based on personalities,” former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. “Stop questioning the size of their following and start questioning their positions.”
The Trump campaign rejected the claim that the former president did not focus enough on political attacks.
“President Trump made the case against Kamala Harris for over two hours yesterday in a record-breaking conversation on X Spaces,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement to CNBC, referring to the former president’s conversation with Elon Musk on Monday night.
“He talked about how weak, failed and dangerously liberal the (Harris)-Waltz ticket is, the most radical in American history. In every single speech, President Trump lays out his bold vision for this country through his America First agenda and contrasts it with (Harris’) grim record of skyrocketing inflation, an out-of-control border and rising crime in American communities,” he added.
It’s difficult to focus on Harris’s positions, in part because she hasn’t yet defined them. Harris hasn’t released a formal policy platform yet, but she said over the weekend that her campaign team plans to release one in the next few days.
Still, Harris’ entry into the race has sparked a wave of enthusiasm among Democrats, reflected in record-breaking donations, significant gains in the polls and arena-sized crowds.
Trump has long been fixated on the size of crowds – both his own and those of his opponents – and sees them as a measure of political momentum.
Harris attracted more than 12,000 people to each of her five rallies last week, according to her campaign team – a feat that is almost unparalleled in modern US politics.
On Sunday, Trump falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to create photographs of her supporters gathered at a rally around Air Force Two in Michigan on August 7. News outlets quickly confirmed that the crowds were real, producing video footage and numerous photos from the scene.
At a press conference on Thursday, Trump claimed he was attracting “ten, twenty and thirty times as many people” as Harris.
During that hour-long press conference, Trump falsely claimed that Harris’ rise in the polls was due solely to her gender, and he again questioned her ethnic identity.
The comments did not go down well with Gerard Baker, the influential Wall Street Journal editor and staunch conservative who has supported Trump in the past.
“By my calculations, about a third of Mr. Trump’s remarks fell into three categories: wrong, obtuse or crazy,” Baker wrote in an opinion piece on Monday.
Trump has shown no signs of changing course.
