Former Donald Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway offered a recipe this week for Trump’s struggling 2024 campaign: “The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see: It’s fewer insults, more insights and [a] policy contrast.”
Fellow former Trump adviser Peter Navarro echoed that. “When Trump attacks [Vice President Kamala] Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris’s support among swing voters rises — particularly among women,” Navarro said.
Trump is not listening.
At a rally Wednesday in Asheville, N.C., Trump called Harris “crazy,” “stupid” and a “lunatic,” adding that “she’s not smart, she’s not intelligent.” He repeatedly derided her laugh, including saying that it’s “career-threatening. That’s a laugh of a person with some big problems.”
And while the event was billed as a speech on economic policy, Trump made clear that wasn’t really his preferred topic.
“They wanted to do a speech on the economy,” Trump said, suggesting this wasn’t his idea and adding: “Today we’re going to talk about one subject. And then we’ll start going back to the other, because we sort of love that.”
He mused at another point: “They say it’s the most important subject. I’m not sure it is.”
Recent days have featured a familiar sight: a coterie of Trump allies taking to broadcast outlets such as Fox News, seemingly to send a message to Trump — in the apparent belief that this is how you get through to the cable-news-junkie former president. They’ve practically begged him to change it up. They’ve sought to push him away from talk of crowd sizes and personal attacks on Harris, and toward policy.
But whether because he refuses to or he can’t, that message is going unheeded by the “audience of one.”
And the contrast continues to loom large as Trump prepares to hold another news conference Thursday in New Jersey.
The pleas have gone well beyond Conway and Navarro. For example:
- Former Trump primary opponent Nikki Haley said Trump is “not going to win” by talking about things like crowd sizes or Harris’s race and intelligence. (Trump has repeatedly suggested that Harris has hidden her Black identity, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)
- Another former Trump primary opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, called for a reset and a “stronger focus on policy.”
- Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) urged Trump to “stop questioning the size of her crowds” and focus on Harris’s record.
- Fox News host Sean Hannity said “we don’t have time for” Trump’s attacks on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R).
- Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said of Trump’s focus on crowd sizes: “So stupid. Just focus on the damn border.”
Trump hasn’t repeated his ridiculous claim Sunday that Harris’s crowd in Detroit was “A.I.’d” and “nobody was there.” But in both an event on X on Monday and speaking to reporters Wednesday, he played up his own crowd sizes.
“We have the biggest crowds ever in the history of politics,” Trump said Wednesday. “We have crowds that nobody’s ever seen before. And we continue to have that.”
Trump has continued to attack Kemp, despite many in his party urging him to ease off a feud with the governor of such a vital swing state.
Despite GOP concerns over his previous attack on Harris’s racial identity, Trump re-upped that attack in a news conference last week.
“I think it’s very disrespectful to both, really,” he said. “Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful to both.”
And despite many Republicans and Trump allies urging him to focus more intently on Harris’s record, Trump has generally spoken only in platitudes about how Harris is bad, without keying on specific policies she advocated — including liberal ones she took during her 2020 presidential campaign.
Indeed, Trump often appears more focused on his former opponent, President Joe Biden, than Harris. A transcript of Trump’s X event Monday with Elon Musk shows Trump referenced Biden by name 21 times and Harris by name only eight times.
Trump’s campaign has thus far shrugged off the calls for a change in approach. Top adviser Chris LaCivita on Fox News on Wednesday avoided directly responding to Haley’s criticism when prompted. But he suggested that the problem was more about the media not covering it when Trump does talk about policy.
GOP vice-presidential nominee JD Vance was more defiant Wednesday.
“To the people who say that Donald Trump should do something different, they had an opportunity to make Donald Trump do something different by challenging him over three separate primaries — every single one of which he won,” Vance told reporters. “So I think that Donald Trump has earned the right to run the campaign that he wants to run.”
Vance insisted that he and Trump are talking about policy, but he added that “we’d much rather have an American president who is who he is” and “who’s willing to offend us” and “lets the American people see exactly who he is.”
There’s a lot of truth in those statements for the Republican Party. Trump is indeed who he is, and he’s demonstrated very limited ability or willingness to adjust his approach. And Republicans have clearly made the decision to own that Trump, for better or worse.
It’s just that it’s mostly been for worse throughout Trump’s time in politics, and the 2024 campaign isn’t looking great either.