To beat Harris, Trump needs an argument

The strange circumstances of this presidential race put Trump in an unusual position. If Harris had won the Democratic nomination in the primaries, by now Trump would have had several months to try out various criticisms, choose the most effective and get it to sink in with the voters he’s trying to reach. Instead, she replaced President Joe Biden as the nominee in August. Trump had plenty of time to make contingency plans for that possibility, but not much, once it happened, to get voters to see her as he wants. It’s an especially urgent task for him because almost everyone in the country has a view of him that is set in stone.

But Trump has been wasting the time he has. More than a month after Harris won the nomination, he still does not have a central criticism of her, no organizing principle for the negative side of his campaign.

In the past few weeks, Trump has called Harris “a low-I.Q. individual” and “dumb as a rock.” He has mocked the way she laughs and described her as “crazy,” “weak” and “phony.” He has awarded her the title of “greatest flip-flopper in history.” At the debate, he went after her as no different from Biden (“She is Biden”), “a horrible negotiator,” a “Marxist” and someone with “no plans” (“She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like, four sentences, like ‘Run, Spot Run’”). He said she was sprinting toward his positions so fast that “I was going to send her a MAGA hat.” He suggested, falsely, that she used to deny being Black.

A lot of these attacks are unimpressive. Some are baseless and juvenile. Some ricochet back on him: He has reversed himself on many issues, and his proposals are often vaporous. Some are ineffective for other reasons. Voters expect politicians to go back and forth on issues, and if they switch to more moderate positions it can make them more appealing.

The comparison to Biden has no sting. He polled so badly this year mainly because he is old and inflation has been high on his watch. His age isn’t transferrable to Harris and linking her to inflation would require an argument that Trump hasn’t sustained.

But even if each of Trump’s criticisms were compelling on its own, they are jarring as an ensemble. Marxists can be accused of many things, but they generally don’t lack for plans. Copying and flip-flopping suggest craftiness more than craziness.

Among all the lines of attack Trump and his team have opened, the one that probably has the most strategic promise for him is that Harris is “dangerously liberal.” Sure, it’s a tried-and-true tactic for a Republican, and maybe boring as a result. But it’s an attack many voters will find plausible. (Depending on the poll, more than 40 percent of the public believes it already.) It builds on materials already in the public record, especially from her season of courting the online left in 2019. The details — including the recently unearthed nugget that back then she affirmed support for government funding of gender transition surgeries for detained immigrants and federal prisoners, which sounds like a right-wing fever dream but is documented fact — are what can breathe life into the old Republican theme.

And it can incorporate many of the other charges from Trump. The flip-flops? They’re because she’s trying to disguise how radical she is. How is she like Biden? In being beholden to the same bad ideas that failed when he tried them — except that she’s even more extreme than he is. The public wants a change from Biden’s policies. Trump could say that she would give them the wrong kind of change.

But executing this strategy, simple though it is, would require from Trump both message discipline and the marshaling of facts. Those are both tall orders for him. He’s probably going to keep doing what he’s doing: insisting that Harris is terrible, without being able to explain just what’s so terrible about her.