It’s been just two weeks since a shooter tried to assassinate the former president and the Republican Party rallied around its candidate at the convention in Milwaukee in the days after. In a normal election, Donald Trump would still be gobbling up the political oxygen.
But when the former president and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, took the stage for a rally Saturday night in St. Cloud, Minnesota, they were facing a vastly different race from the one they were running in just a week ago. President Joe Biden’s exit and the elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ likely nominee has rocked the 2024 election and stolen the news cycle, blunting the momentum Trump could have seen over the last two weeks. Instead, the polling advantage he was building over Biden has mostly dissipated now that he’s running against Harris.
And now, Trump is forced to pivot to a new opponent just 100 days from the election. He again used Saturday to test out a slew of attack lines, hitting Harris on everything from the border to inflation to abortion and crime — even taking a swipe at her laugh.
“We have a new victim now, Kamala. A brand new victim, and honestly she’s a radical left lunatic. When you find out about her, all I have to say is defund the police,” Trump said.
“Three months ago, she was thought of so badly, [the media] were just killing her. And now they’re trying to make her into a, let’s say, Margaret Thatcher. I don’t think so. It’s not going to happen. Margaret Thatcher didn’t laugh like that. Did she? If she did, she wouldn’t have been Margaret Thatcher,” he continued.
It speaks to how Biden’s exit from the race has jolted the 2024 race for both parties. Democrats are scrambling to introduce their candidate on a truncated timeline, while Trump and his allies are struggling to find a consistent line of attack against Harris. Republicans are trying to adjust to an opponent vastly different from the 81-year-old, white, male incumbent they crafted their campaign messaging around.
But even as his focus shifts to Harris, Trump often found himself reverting to old attacks against Biden, before catching himself and jumping back to the vice president. As he often does, he painted a dark picture of a country in decline, one he said will be devastated if Harris wins in November. He addressed Saturday’s attack in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights, using it as an example of Biden’s and Harris’ weakness on foreign policy.
“That’s why this happened today in Israel. Shocking that it happened out of nowhere. A Trump victory will bring back leadership, competence and common sense, and strength to the Oval Office. We had no wars. We had no wars. Think of it,” Trump said.
He repeatedly hit Harris on immigration, calling her the “border czar” — a term Republicans have attached to her assignment working with Central American countries to address the root causes of migration, and one that Democrats have tried to distance her from. He also again repeated that she would ban fracking, a position she held the last time she ran for president — but one that her campaign said she no longer supports.
“Trump’s false claims about fracking bans are an obvious attempt to distract from his own plans to enrich oil and gas executives at the expense of the middle class. The Biden-Harris Administration passed the largest ever climate change legislation and under their leadership, America now has the highest ever domestic energy production. This Administration created 300,000 energy jobs, while Trump lost nearly a million and his Project 2025 would undo the enormous progress we’ve made the past four years,” campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said in a statement.
Trump also spent some time talking about the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, that injured him and killed one of his supporters. He praised the Secret Service for protecting him and taking down the shooter, as well as his supporters for staying in place.
He also quipped that the shooting didn’t change him.
“They all say ‘I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him.’ No, I haven’t changed. Maybe I’ve gotten worse,” Trump said, adding that the “incompetence” of the Biden administration has angered him.
Trump has also referenced the shooting in fundraising appeals to supporters, but mostly obliquely, releasing mugs and T-shirts with the phrase “Fear Not” and an image of him with his fist raised in front of an American flag — a similar pose to the one he took after he was shot, although it is not the same photo.
But the majority of Trump’s fundraising messages in the past week have taken a different tack, including bashing Harris and asking supporters for donations to help keep up with her sudden flood of cash.
This week, a number of new polls have shown the race tightening between Trump and Harris. At a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, his supporters acknowledged he had a tougher race now that the Democratic ticket has changed, and his campaign signaled this week that he might drop out of the Sept. 10 presidential debate Harris has agreed to.
“Tonight in Minnesota, a bitter, unhinged, 78-year-old convicted felon kept clinging to his lies about the 2020 election he lost being ‘rigged,’ rambled about his former opponent and golfing, and made excuses for why he’s afraid to debate Vice President Harris. Donald Trump said that if loses, our country is ‘finished.’ Yesterday, he promised the end of our democracy if he wins,” said Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika.
As Trump spoke to the crowd on Saturday, he often found himself attacking his old opponent instead of Harris.
“I don’t want to waste a lot of time because it’s over now, right? He’s gone,” Trump said at one point. “I told you he would be. I told you he wasn’t going to make it. I told you.”
Jessica Piper contributed to this report.
