How much different will Donald Trump's attacks on Kamala Harris be than they would have been on Joe Biden?
Trump's tried and true attacks on Biden scored regularly with voters. Hitting the president on his age, his open borders policies, prices, interest rates, and a host of other economic and social issues gave Trump a consistent, if not comfortable lead in the polls.
Make no mistake: Kamala Harris is a different candidate whom the Trump campaign must approach differently. But she still represents a target-rich environment. The Trump campaign's biggest problem may be trying to figure out how not to scatter its attacks over too broad an area.
One fertile area of attack is going to be the undemocratic, elitist way the Democrats tossed Biden under the bus when it became clear he couldn't win. Voters cast more than 14 million votes for Biden, which the party elites have now thrown overboard because they felt that Biden couldn't bring the party victory in November.
The GOP is already cutting commercials to run during the Democratic National Convention that will highlight the disenfranchisement of Democratic voters and the undermining of the democratic process at the hands of the elites.
Republican Vice Presidential Candidate J.D. Vance previewed this attack line on Monday in Ohio.
“The idea of selecting the Democrat Party’s nominee because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard — that is not how it works,” Vance said. “That is the threat to democracy, not the Republican Party.”
Another avenue of attack will be Harris's and the entire Democratic Party's complicity in hiding Biden's dangerous infirmities from the American people. Even changing out Biden for Harris as president won't make this issue go away.
Again, Vance has been chosen to make the initial salvos against Harris on this issue.
He claimed on Monday that “Kamala Harris lied about it. My Senate Democratic colleagues lied about it. The media lied about it. Every single person who saw Joe Biden knew that he wasn’t capable of doing the job, and for three years they said nothing, until he became a political deadweight.”
Vice presidential candidates used to be chosen for their ability to act as attack dogs while the presidential candidate remained "above the fray." Vance is proving to be a Doberman in going after the Democrats.
Amusingly, many of the same Democrats who are now claiming that Trump is the old candidate and confused said just a week ago that age didn't matter that much. You can guess how far that Democrat attack on Trump will go.
Harris, the "Border Czar" is easy pickings. “She presided over the worst invasion of the U.S. in the history of the country: 11.5 million people,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said at the GOP convention. “And it’s deliberate. She wanted this to happen. Joe Biden wanted this to happen.”
“Wow, just watching the Fake News, and they’re doing their very best to turn the Worst President in the History of our Country into a ‘Brilliant and Heroic Leader’ (He was heroic because he quit!), and to turn “Dumb as a Rock” Kamala Harris from a totally failed and insignificant Vice President into a future “Great” President,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “No, it just doesn’t work that way!”
Compared to even just eight years ago, the media will have a difficult time selling Kamala as anything but a failure in getting control of the border. She will argue that it wasn't her mandate. But considering the hoopla that surrounded Biden naming her to the post, it's hard to argue that wasn't what Biden was trying to sell her as.
Biden wanted to avoid blame for the crisis at the border and tried to palm it off on Harris. Trump will see if he can finish the job.
