Harris is freaking Trump out by shrugging him off

Let’s hope Harris continues to shrug off Trump’s racist and misogynist attacks. It’s clearly driving him crazy.

Recent days have seen Trump spiraling. In a single 24-hour period, he used his social media platform to spread a crass joke about Harris performing a sex act; suggested without evidence that she and President Joe Biden were partially responsible for the assassination attempt upon him; promoted a QAnon slogan; and sent out fake images of Harris and a host of other leading Democratic figures in orange prison uniforms.

Harris’s team has, wisely, declined to comment on his antics. As one campaign official put it to me: “Why would we step in this man’s way?”

Trump’s volatility is also the reason Harris’s team is arguing to open the microphones for both candidates during the entirety of next month’s debate.

That’s a change from the rule that President Joe Biden’s team insisted upon for their June faceoff, in which only the person whose turn it was to speak could be heard. The Biden campaign realized that was a mistake when their own “dial testing” of audience reaction showed people were turned off whenever Trump opened his mouth.

Meanwhile, in its efforts to get the former president back on track, Trump’s campaign keeps scheduling policy-focused “messaging” events, at which he is supposed to address issues that swing voters care about, such as the economy. It isn’t working very well. Trump listlessly delivers some lines from the teleprompter, then gets bored and begins recycling the rants from his rallies. He mocks the campaign strategists who want him to stick to the script and threatens to fire them.

American politics have never seen anything quite like the dizziness of the past six weeks. Democrats regard the speed and ease with which Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, picked a running mate in Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and pulled off a successful convention in Chicago as just short of a miracle. Swinging through battleground states, she and Walz are drawing MAGA-sized crowds — something else that has been freaking Trump out.

But even as Trump is floundering, and numbers are moving Harris’s direction, she still has to seal the deal with voters. Despite having been in national office for more than three years, the vice president remains an unfamiliar, undefined figure to many voters. Polls indicate her disapproval numbers remain higher than her favorable ones.

Harris’s CNN interview marked the beginning of a testing period in which she will be called upon to deliver more specifics.

That part is a work in progress. Bash prodded the vice president to explain, for instance, why she has distanced herself from her previous, more liberal stances on border security, fracking and health care. Harris’s repeated assertion that “my values have not changed” did not explain why her positions have.

Harris, not known as a particularly deft politician, is also walking a thin line. Although she declares herself proud of what the Biden-Harris administration has achieved, she is portraying herself as a candidate of change who will “turn the page on the last decade of what I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies.”

Another thing that is becoming clear as the campaign moves forward: Harris does not plan to emphasize the obvious and historic significance of the fact that the country could elect its first female president — and a woman of color, no less.

Near the end of the interview, Bash asked Harris to comment on a photograph. It showed her grandniece Amara Ajagu, her hair in braids, staring up at the stage as the vice president delivered her acceptance speech at the convention.

“You didn’t explicitly talk about gender or race in your speech, but it obviously means a lot to a lot of people,” Bash said. “And that viral picture really says it. What does it mean to you?”

Harris allowed that she had been “deeply touched” and found the moment “very humbling. It’s very humbling in many ways.”

But she insisted: “Listen, I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”

In other words, what Harris chooses not to talk about is as important to winning this race as what she does.