Why Trump is still struggling to find a strategy countering Harris

Susan, I want to go to something that you wrote just yesterday.

You wrote a piece in The New Yorker about how Trump might very well be missing Biden at this point.

Go into that a little bit.

SUSAN GLASSER: Well, I mean, you know, it's amazing.

Obviously it's been an incredible whirlwind.

We are speaking today on day 19 only since Joe Biden dropped out, was pushed out, you know, decided to exit the presidential race.

And, you know, the world has sort of been reinvented since then.

The one person who's still talking about Biden in American politics has been Donald Trump.

He has repeatedly been posting on social media about him during this press conference at Mar-a-Lago yesterday.

He repeatedly unasked for, you know, kept going back to, he says that it's unfair that Joe Biden is not in the race anymore.

He says that he's even repeated multiple times that it's somehow unconstitutional that Joe Biden is no longer the Democratic nominee.

I suppose in the interest of fact-checking, he has not been able to cite a provision of the Constitution that might apply in this case.

But, you know, what it speaks to is that Trump has spent not just this campaign season, but, you know, the four-year campaign before that, running against Joe Biden, thinking about how to tear down Joe Biden, you know, marinating in the idea that he had this race won because Biden was such a weakened incumbent.

And he has really struggled, I think, to come up with a retooled campaign for an entirely different thing.

And just the one thing that it seems to me most important about Biden's exit, as it pertains to Trump, is that it's just taken the issue of the future and given it back to Democrats, given it back to Harris.

It's now Donald Trump, who is the candidate who looks old, whose fitness for office is the issue.

And I think that press conference, in many ways, really showcased those questions.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Wasn't it Nikki Haley who said that the first party to dump its 80-year-old candidate will win?

I think it's an interesting observation.

I want to ask you about something else that Susan wrote.

You know, Trump seems to miss Biden.

The Democrats don't seem to miss him at all.

His name was not invoked at the opening rally in Philadelphia, Harris and Walz.

And it was a little perturbing.

I don't know if you -- I mean, I guess you all picked up on that too.

What's going on here with Biden and the party?

PETER BAKER: Yes.

Well, he's basically disappeared, right?

He has -- he's doing a few events here and there, and now he's off in Delaware for the long weekend.

He is going to do his first joint appearance with Vice President Harris next Thursday.

That's the first one since his departure from the race, and it's more than three weeks after, and then he's going to have Monday night at the convention instead of Thursday night at the convention.

Thursday night's the night, of course, the nominee gets.

Monday night's the night you get when you're the former president.

And so it's a real step down for him.

And then as soon as that speech is done on Monday night of that convention, he will disappear for the rest of the week on vacation.

So, he's kind of exiting the stage a little bit.

Now, you could say maybe he's a little, you know, perturbed that they pushed him out of the race.

Maybe he's a little unhappy about that, or he's leaving the stage to her so that she can build up herself as the candidate, maybe a little bit of both.

But no question about it that he has, in fact, sort of receded at this point while she has, you know, jumped -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, quickly.

PETER BAKER: Yes, so quickly.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Democrats are trying to make this a change election.

And, you know, Harris is an incumbent.

She's running as part of an incoming administration, but they very much want to present themselves as something fresh and something new to the country.

And so Biden complicates that argument and will continue to complicate it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Let's go to Mar-a-Lago, not literally.

Move the table there.

That would be a great place to film.

You just came back from Mar-a-Lago from that press conference.

It was kind of a greatest hits montage press conference.

I want you to watch one moment from it and we can talk about this and others.

DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: I've spoken to the biggest crowds.

Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me.

If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, it's same real estate, same everything, same number of people.

If not, we had more.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You know, one thing I noticed from that is that he took a break to call the I Have a Dream speech a great speech, which maybe that means that he still thinks that black men are in play.

I don't know, but it was -- that was even for Donald Trump, kind of the compare yourself to Martin Luther King Jr., I thought that was -- give us the general sense.

You were right there in the room.

He seemed simultaneously filled with a kind of a bragging quality, but also a little bit lost, couldn't hear the questions sometimes.

What was the mood there?

MICHAEL SCHERER: Well, you know, it was actually when he got the question about the crowd size that the tone of that press conference changed.

He came out just bashing Harris, bashing Biden, bashing Democrats, hitting them on issues, which is what his campaign wants them to be doing, hitting Walz.

And then as soon as he got the crowd size question, it was like a whole new -- like it was going straight to the heart of who -- what his identity is.

And it started to sort of go off the rails there.

I thought it was a, I mean, we came down to Florida, a bunch of reporters, for a background briefing that morning by senior campaign staff.

And when Trump found out that we were going to be down there, and this was a very classic thing that campaigns do, here's how we're targeting voters, here's what our polling says, I mean, just sort of the basics of a campaign, he said, let's get buses, let's bring them to Mar-a-Lago, I want to talk to them.

And what was striking about that day was how different the substance of the morning presentation was, in which the campaign is doing very traditional campaign things.

They have a message against Harris.

They're going to prosecute the message.

They have door knocking.

They have ads, you know, they know that they have something they're trying to do.

And then they have a candidate who they don't control.

And there's just a disconnect there.

You know, most campaigns exist to discipline their candidates.

And the Trump campaign is built differently.

The campaign exists, and they have their candidate, and then the campaign reacts to their candidate, and sometimes tries to manage it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to talk about - - it's fascinating.

We're watching in real time the Trump campaign and Trump separately, I guess, pivot to figuring out what's the argument against Kamala Harris that would work.

Something that obviously Trump was trying out last week, Adam, was this, she's not really black, she's Indian, she never said she was black, which is kind of interesting if you go to Howard University as an 18-year-old.

You're kind of signaling something about your sense of who you are.

But it seems to have dropped off a little bit.

Are we just in the sort of the tryout where he's seeing what will stick?

ADAM HARRIS: Yes, it seems like a really spaghetti on the wall sort of phase that we're going through where they're not -- they were really sure how to run against Joe Biden.

The entire campaign strategy was built around the idea that we're going to win because we're running against Joe Biden.

We're old, but he's older, right, all of these things.

He doesn't get people excited.

Our base is sort of built in.

They don't necessarily have that for Kamala Harris.

And so, effectively, what he's trying to do, you mentioned kind of the maybe he still thinks that black men are in play.

He says that at the press conference yesterday, right?

We're doing better with black men than Harris is.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is there proof of the polling of that?

ADAM HARRIS: Not necessarily, right?

He's running a little bit better than in 2020.

But, you know, the issue here is going to be whether or not he is actually going to turn those voters out or if those voters are actually going to stay home.

There is a sort of streak in the sort of black masculinity that would lean towards Trump, but black women are notably, you know, very much in the block for Kamala Harris.

Sort of we've seen the excitement shift in the polling where some of those voters who were willing to go with Trump when it was Biden are shifting back to Kamala.

But I think there's also -- there's a little bit about like thinking of the economy, right?

Most voters are saying that the economy is the thing that we are going to go to the polls about, right?

30, somewhere around 36 percent will save the economy over any other issue.

And, you know, Vice President Harris staying away from President Biden at the moment is probably a good thing for her to sort of keep a little bit of distance, as the campaign is trying.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But very quickly, I'm hearing that you're not necessarily thinking that the play that Trump might be running, what race is she, she's this, she's that, it doesn't seem to have a salience that, let's say, birtherism had a long time ago.

ADAM HARRIS: No.

Yes, it seemed like an offhanded remark, right.

As he was kind of going through that conversation at the National Association of Black Journalists, he was really just sort of throwing out anything that he could that might stick.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, you know, by the way, that's a huge -- you bring up a huge issue.

Susan, you're a day-to-day, hour-to-hour tracker of the many moods of Donald Trump, and the statements of Donald Trump.

You know, we sometimes think that there's a plan behind things but, you know, you use the term offhand.

When you're watching Trump and tracking him week-to-week, how much do you think is just stuff that comes out spontaneously and how much do you think that he's thinking, I'm going to create confusion about her, the nature of her racial identity?

SUSAN GLASSER: Okay.

So, I think that Michael's point is a very important point, which is that there's -- just as there was during the Trump administration, there's the Trump administration's policy and then there's what President Trump was doing, and they were often at odds with each other.

That clearly is the case in the campaign.

But to the point about Trump, he's obviously not some kind of like, you know, 3D chess player, okay?

He's very undisciplined, and so it's often revealing what he says.

However, my view is that he does have certain, you know, playbook.

And, you know, a 78-year-old man, he's not going to reinvent himself.

He's not getting a new playbook.

This kind of racism and race baiting and bringing this up is ingrained in him.

It is one of his plays.

And I think that his play here is not to get more of the black male vote, it's signaling very clearly to his white supporters, hey, remember, I'm running against a woman of color.

And it seems to me that, you know, we're overthinking this and we do this all the time with Trump.

We don't need to overthink it.

Like, yes, he wants to bring up race in the campaign because he thinks it's a liability for her.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, we'll find out next week what game he is playing, if it's not 3D chess.