Trump shrugs off Republican pleas to stay on message

Republicans are pleading with former President Donald Trump to run a more disciplined campaign as time runs short for him to reclaim the momentum from Vice President Kamala Harris, but Trump appears not to be heeding their advice.

Trump has made Harris’s past embrace of the far Left the centerpiece of his pivot away from President Joe Biden. Meanwhile, his campaign has spent millions portraying her as the “border czar” who permitted record levels of illegal immigration.

But Republicans have implored Trump in increasingly public terms to stop muddling his message with incendiary and off-script comments that distract from their attempts to define Harris, seemingly to no avail.

For instance, Trump drove a dayslong news cycle earlier this month by falsely accusing Harris of faking her black identity, while his preoccupation with the crowds she is drawing has allies concerned he is not adjusting to the drastically different race. This week alone, he sat down for two hours with Elon Musk for an X Space interview before trying to prebut Harris’s economic address on Friday with his own policy speech, during which he mocked the need for “intellectual” remarks and the vice president for her laugh.

“You’re effectively drowning out your own best message,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist and CNN contributor. “You could say the right thing, and you could know instinctively what you need to do, but if you bury it under things that are trivial or not germane to winning, and those things happen to be catnip for your enemies, you’re defeating yourself.”

Jennings is hardly alone in sending that message. Republicans from former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have spoken publicly in recent days to encourage Trump to talk more about policy.

“If this is a referendum on issues and results, Trump will pull away and win,” said one Republican Party official who asked for anonymity to discuss the matter candidly. “He simply needs to hold Kamala accountable.” 

The plea for discipline is as old as Trump’s political career. But it comes at a perilous moment for Republicans, who were preparing to challenge an unpopular incumbent but have instead been handed a largely undefined candidate with three months left to recalibrate.

“Republicans have yet to roll back the Democrats’ strength in the suburbs, and it is suburban voters who decide presidential elections,” a separate Republican strategist said. “Today’s Republican Party brand is very strong in rural America, and that’s enough to win states like South Carolina and Texas. But the swing states tend to have larger populations of well-educated suburban voters, and we need to start selling what they’re buying.”

Harris has since erased the lead Trump had against Biden and, with it, the euphoria of the GOP nominating convention one month ago.

“Give the Democrats credit for getting their presidential campaign out of the ditch and back on track,” said the first Republican official. “It’s a remarkable reversal of fortune.”

Trump’s rocky reset of the presidential race

Trump has endeavored to reset in the presidential race. On Thursday, he will hold his second press conference in as many weeks in an effort to pressure Harris to answer questions from the media.

Harris has yet to grant an interview since launching her campaign for president three weeks ago. 

“Kamala Harris is Bernie Sanders in a pantsuit,” said Ron Nehring, a Republican strategist and the 2014 GOP nominee for Lt. Governor of California. “Whenever she has to reach for a policy answer, she always lurches to the Left. This didn’t matter much when she was just VP eye candy, but as the nominee, she pulls the party away from the coalition which elected Biden in 2020.”

But Trump risks generating more unflattering headlines if he veers off script. During his first press conference at Mar-a-Lago last week, Trump claimed that his crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, was the same size as Martin Luther King Jr.’s for his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.

At a campaign stop in Michigan on Wednesday, Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), told reporters that Trump had “earned the right” to stump as he sees fit and that his “unfiltered” approach to the race is an asset, not a liability.

Vance disputed the idea that Trump, who spends most of his rallies fixated on Harris and her record, is doing himself a disservice.

“Look, if you listen to what Donald J. Trump says, what I say, we are prosecuting the case against Kamala Harris on policy,” he said. “We’re reminding people that Donald Trump delivered peace and prosperity, and Kamala Harris has delivered war all over the world and unaffordable groceries and housing here at home.”

Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita similarly dismissed the criticism during a Fox News Radio interview this week.

“The focus of the campaign has always been about putting Americans in a better position to be successful, and it’s going to continue to be that way,” LaCivita said.

Democrats high on ‘exuberance porn’

Nonetheless, Trump has stoked speculation that Harris has knocked him off balance. He falsely alleged she used artificial intelligence to inflate the number of attendees at her rally in Michigan last week, while he still smarts over her decision to adopt his “no tax on tips” proposal for service workers.

Jennings downplayed the narrative as “overstated” and a byproduct of the “exuberance porn” that has accompanied Harris’s political honeymoon, though conceded it does not “absolve” Trump from the need to stay on-message.

“Everything about their commentary on Trump is filled with snark and wish-casting, and so when he gets outside of a tight framework, it lets them indulge in this kind of chatter,” he said.

At the same time, Cesar Conda, a Republican strategist and former chief of staff to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), contended Harris is “one interview away” from squandering her lead.

“What looked like a cakewalk for Trump has now turned into a competitive race,” Conda said. “No doubt that Trump has had a rocky transition from running against Biden for all of these years to Harris.”

“There is really no need for Republicans to feel down,” he added, arguing Harris merely brought undecided Democrats back into the fold. “Trump hasn’t lost any support since Biden dropped out and Harris became the likely nominee.”

Harris has kept expectations low for her campaign. She describes herself as an “underdog” despite her narrow lead nationally and in a handful of battleground states.

Simultaneously, Trump fundamentally rejects the polling, adamant that he remains in the lead by large margins.

“I don’t think she can possibly win,” he told a crowd in North Carolina on Thursday.