CHICAGO — In his history as a candidate for president, Donald Trump has never experienced anything like the past month. Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black and Indian American woman, has pushed the White alpha male to the sidelines of the national conversation, denying him the spotlight he craves and constantly demands.
Democrats concluded their electrifying national convention here on Thursday night with Harris as the main event, delivering an address sculpted to keep her on the crest of a wave that has changed the contours of the presidential election.
The Democrats are in the game, the former president is in a box, and it’s not clear whether he knows what to do.
Trying to free himself from this bind, Trump has plucked from what was once a tested playbook of tricks that in the past has kept his opponents off-balance and himself at the center of attention. But as the campaign now moves to its next phase, the focus on him and how he attempts to regain his balance will be as much or more of the story compared with how Harris navigates the road ahead.
Harris defined the stakes of the election in blunt terms in her acceptance speech. “Fellow Americans, this election is not only the most important of our lives, it is one of the most important in the life of our nation,” she said. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences — but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious. … Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
Meanwhile, as she was speaking, Trump was providing a running stream of criticism on Truth Social, though in the same unfocused and sometimes confusing style that has marked many of his recent appearances. “IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” he wrote in one post.
As Harris has glided through the past month, Trump has taken to social media or to friendly media interviews in hopes of setting the terms of the conversation, but that has backfired. He has tried invective, exaggeration and lies, something that in the past he used to shift the focus, sometimes to distract from his own problems, at other times to draw attention away from a rival. It hasn’t done what he hoped.
The former president has tried counterprogramming to force the media to look his way this week. It should have been obvious to him that this would be Harris’s week in the same way that the Republican convention was his. The only news Democrats made during his convention was that pressure on President Joe Biden to quit his reelection bid was ramping up. Trump has learned, perhaps painfully, that at this moment, fewer are listening to him. In short, nothing seems to be working the way it once did.
As the Democrats leave Chicago and the campaign turns to its final season, Harris enjoys both the attention and the momentum. Whether this can last much longer is anyone’s guess. Everyone now awaits the next round of national and battleground state polls to see whether Harris receives the traditional bounce that accompanies a successful convention and whether the enthusiasm that was on display this week inside the United Center and at massive rallies in the days before will settle a bit.
As many of the luminaries who spoke here this week reminded Democrats, this is a very tight race, close enough certainly that even a disoriented Trump could win — if he regains his legs as a candidate, which is one of the biggest questions at this moment.
Campaigns are about many things: the state of the nation and the national mood, candidate character and candidate quality, policy prescriptions, the strength of a party’s infrastructure, money and advertising. But they are also about some intangibles, things that do not rise to the level of high policy or dignified debate, including sometimes a day-by-day jujitsu contest at which Trump once excelled.
Take ratings. Trump cares about television ratings and crowd sizes above all else, but for the past month, Harris has countered him, even bested him, at his own game. Her crowds now match or exceed his. Her followers now are as enthusiastic as his, a dramatic change from when Biden was the expected Democratic nominee. Her campaign fundraising, stuffed with grassroots contributions, far exceeds Trump’s. Now, her convention’s ratings were better than his through at least Wednesday. In short, by the kinds of measures that Trump seems to care about most, he has fallen behind a woman he has disparaged and for whom he has said he has no respect.
On the issues, the debate that Republicans say they want has not been engaged. The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll of a week ago showed voters trust Trump more than Harris on some of the most important issues, among them inflation, the economy, immigration and the Israel-Gaza war. Harris enjoys the advantage on abortion, race relations, health care, protecting democracy, appointments to the Supreme Court and gun violence.
Harris began to fill in some of the unanswered questions about her positions at this week’s convention, but there is much more to learn. The Wall Street Journal editorial page labeled her “the least known presidential nominee in modern times.” She will continue to be under pressure to fill in the gaps, but given the short time left in the campaign, she might choose to remain broad and generalized in her description of policy priorities, hoping that she can gain the public’s trust without having to release details that risk alienating certain constituencies.
Trump by now is one of the best-known presidential nominees ever, in part because he has already served one term. He has never retreated from the public domain since riding down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to launch his first campaign. But there are questions for him as well about what his real priorities would be in a second term. He has run away from Project 2025, the conservative blueprint drafted by many of his allies. While he has posted policy positions on his website, he doesn’t offer much specificity or detail about his plans. He has always liked things vague and has a long history of shape-shifting.
Many of the issues will be aired out when Harris and Trump meet on Sept. 10 for their first debate. Absent something unexpected between now and then, that will be Trump’s opportunity to reassert himself and recapture momentum. But is he going to be ready? Were it not for Biden’s faltering performance at the CNN debate in Atlanta in June, Trump might have drawn the bulk of the criticism. He spent much of the 90 minutes offering old and new falsehoods and enough distortions to give fact-checkers a full night’s work.
The debate will be a test for Harris, as well. Though her experience as a prosecutor was front and center in testimonials this week in Chicago, debates are about both prosecution and defense. She will have to prove she is as adept at the latter as the former. But her performance might matter less if Trump is as unfocused and undisciplined as he has been.
Most candidates would be unsettled by what has happened, by the stunning decision of a president to end his candidacy only a few months before an election, and by the speed and skill with which Harris took over the party. The election’s broad themes changed overnight, turning a backward-looking contest between two old and unpopular men into one of future vs. past and pitting a new-generation woman against the aging Trump.
Any candidate would have needed some time to regroup, to find the new lines of attack and new themes of emphasis. Trump’s campaign advisers may believe they know what they want their candidate to do, but they have yet to get Trump to listen to them.
That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Eight years ago, Trump’s campaign was in turmoil in August. He shook up his staff and made a course correction. Even in the face of his crude, sexual utterings in the “Access Hollywood” tape that came to light a month ahead of the election — a revelation that many Republicans thought would sink his campaign — Trump persevered, with greater discipline, to win the election.
With Biden in the race, the focus was on his age and especially the question of his physical and mental capacity to serve another term. Trump, who projects more vigor, escaped closer scrutiny. But anyone who watched Trump in 2016 and even some in 2020 and compares that with the candidate on the campaign trail today can see the differences.
Whether it is a true decline in his capacities or merely the fact that he hasn’t yet adapted to a campaign against Harris, his performances have been well short of the focused and at least modestly disciplined Trump at his most effective. He says he misses Biden, and it shows. But as the Democrats said all week in Chicago, there’s no going back.