This is exactly what the Trump team feared

On Super Tuesday night in March, just before Donald Trump effectively ended the Republican primaries and secured a general election rematch against President Joe Biden, I asked Trump’s presidential campaign co-managers what they feared most about Biden.

“Honestly, it’s less him,” Chris LaCivita said. “And more—”

“Institutional democrats,” added Susie Wiles, finishing her partner’s thought.

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It was a revealing exchange, and a theme we revisited often. The Democratic Party, Wiles and LaCivita would tell me in conversations over the next few months, was a machine—well-organized and well-funded, with a history of support from the low-propensity voters who turn out every four years for presidential contests. Normally, they explained, Democrats would have a structural advantage in a race like this. But something was holding the party back: Biden.

LaCivita and Wiles had expected the campaign narrative to be controlled by Democrats from the start: Trump, after all, had derailed the peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election, incited an attack on the U.S. Capitol and, most recently, faced numerous criminal charges and the possibility of prison. And yet Biden offered an opening. Already the oldest president in American history, he had begun to show signs of rapid deterioration in 2023. That would make the campaign a game of survival more than skill, with each candidate needing to convince voters that he was less unqualified than his opponent.

In the race to overcome historically low hurdles, Trump began to gain momentum. Polls showed that he was making unprecedented gains among low-propensity voters, specifically black and Hispanic voters — not because of anything he was doing particularly well, but because of apathy and disillusionment within the Democratic base. Since the spring, the numbers told a straightforward story: Biden was not going to win. Democrats could only watch helplessly as the president denied the party’s young caucus — and its organizational machine — the chance to change the narrative.

“I don’t think Joe Biden has a lot of advantages,” Wiles said on Super Tuesday. “But I think the Democrats do.”

She and LaCivita were right to be concerned. Biden’s exit from the presidential race this afternoon — hours after his top surrogates had insisted he would stay — is the culmination of a remarkable pressure campaign, launched after his disastrous performance in the June 27 debate and aimed at pushing the president into retirement. On the Republican side, it caps a frenzied four months in which the Trump campaign went from confident about Biden’s shortcomings to fearing his departure, and then stunned by Biden’s sudden letter of doing what Republicans thought he would never do.

Republicans I spoke to today, some still hungover from celebrating what many felt was a victory night in Milwaukee, expressed shock at the news of Biden’s exit. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reinventing a campaign — one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden — against a new, unfamiliar opponent. “So we are forced to spend time and money fighting Corrupt Joe Biden, he polls poorly after a terrible debate and drops out of the race,” a clearly irritated Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “Now we have to start all over again.”

For months, talking to Wiles and LaCivita, I was struck by their concern about the potential for a dramatic shift — Democratic leaders pushing Biden aside in favor of a younger candidate. They told me that the Trump campaign was preparing contingency plans and studying the weaknesses of potential replacements, starting with Vice President Kamala Harris. But by the time of the debate, they believed the Democrats’ window was all but closed. Even in the immediate aftermath — as Democratic officials openly called for Biden to drop out — Wiles and LaCivita were banking on the status quo. More than anything, Trump’s allies believed that the president’s stubborn Irish ego would not let him back down from a fight with a man he despised.

But they couldn’t take any chances. Two weeks ago, according to a campaign source who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio went into the field to begin testing the results of a Harris-Trump matchup. Those polls, conducted in several battleground states, represented the most concrete step yet taken to prepare for the possibility of a new challenger. Still, with the polls kept secret — I have not been able to verify the results — there was no outward sign that Trump’s operation expected a reset. When convention speakers contacted the GOP nominee’s campaign, asking whether to tailor their speeches to attack Harris, they were told to keep the focus on Biden.

In many ways, the convention scene was one of a party peaking too soon. Campaigns are marathons measured by shifts in momentum and narrative, and Republicans in Milwaukee were basking in what felt like a three-week winning streak, stretching back to the debate, with the daily chatter behind the scenes increasingly focused on Democratic fatalism and the seeming inevitability of Trump. No Republican I spoke to could recall such a long stretch of sustained momentum. And with Biden seemingly on the up, they left Milwaukee believing that this hot streak might never end.

The president’s abrupt departure shattered any such fantasy. Suddenly, Republicans who had been boasting last week about expanding the electoral map—invading Minnesota and Virginia and other decidedly blue areas—were worried that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly would join the Democratic ticket, partnering with Harris to bring into play key battlegrounds that just 24 hours earlier had seemed out of reach.

Given the historical volatility of this campaign—Trump survived an assassination attempt just last weekend—there’s no guarantee that Harris will eventually succeed Biden at the top of the ticket. The Trump campaign certainly believes she will—understandably, given the rapid consolidation of Democratic officials around her after Biden’s announcement—and released a statement Sunday afternoon that linked Harris to her unpopular boss. “Kamala Harris is as much of a joke as Biden,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement. “Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been the Enabler-in-Chief for Corrupt Joe this entire time. They have each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two.”

This is the crux of what the Trump campaign believes—that any Democrat who takes up the party banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable. Republicans will point to historic inflation, millions of illegal border crossings, and geopolitical chaos from Eastern Europe to the Middle East as evidence that the entire Democratic Party has failed the American people. “We talk about strength versus weakness, success versus failure,” LaCivita told me before the convention, summing up the campaign’s strategic vision for the race. “The great thing about this message is that it’s not unique to Joe Biden.”

But messaging is a secondary concern for Democrats. What they need first is a messenger.

It’s true that Harris will have a hard time shaking off some policy criticism; her appointment early in her vice presidency to handle the southern border could, in fact, make her even more vulnerable to immigration-related attacks than Biden was. It’s also true, however, that policy criticism wasn’t what made Biden unelectable in the eyes of most Americans. In a nation that’s evenly divided and deeply polarized, Biden lost ground—with his party’s base and with independents alike—because he was perceived as too old and weak to serve another four years in office.

Harris is none of those things. At 59, she is two decades younger than Trump and will have no trouble keeping up with him on the campaign trail or on the debate stage. She is also a former prosecutor who, if anything, is known for being too tough on crime. (Trump allies told me they plan to attack his left wing with accusations that Harris over-incarcerated young black men when she was California’s attorney general.) At the very least, Trump’s lieutenants realize, Harris’s promotion will provide a desperately needed boost to Democrats nationwide in the form of fundraising, volunteerism and enthusiasm. Whatever her flaws as a politician—Harris ran a disastrous 2020 primary campaign for president, marked by organizational infighting and embarrassing statements—she does not have the flaw that has proven insurmountable for Biden.

The Trump campaign insists nothing has changed. Wiles and LaCivita are telling staff that given the obstacles Trump has already overcome—trials, a conviction, an assassination attempt that nearly killed him—a new Democratic candidate is just another hurdle in the 2024 inferno.

But they know it’s more than that. They know that from the moment they joined Trump, everything they planned for this campaign—the messaging, the advertising, the microtargeting, the fieldwork, the mailers, the digital engagement, the social media maneuvers—was designed to defeat Joe Biden. Even the choice of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledge, was a luxury designed to boost margins with the base in a landslide victory rather than to persuade undecided voters in a tight race.

The mindset of this Trump campaign, LaCivita once told me, is to spend every day on the offensive. The team wants to shape the pace and substance of each news cycle and force Democrats to react, ensuring that key battles are fought on the GOP’s chosen terrain. It worked so well that Biden was ruined before his party’s convention. Now, the Trump operation is vowing to destroy Harris—if she does indeed become the nominee—in the same way.

And yet for a campaign that went to bed on Saturday believing it would dictate the terms of the election every day until Nov. 5, Sunday brought an unfamiliar sense of powerlessness. For the first time in a long time, Trump does not control the 2024 narrative.

Via The Atlantic