Christian Paz is a senior politics reporter at Vox, where he covers the Democratic Party. He joined Vox in 2022 after reporting on national and international politics for the Atlantic’s politics, global, and ideas teams, including the role of Latino voters in the 2020 election.
As Vice President Kamala Harris reintroduced herself to the nation and laid out her case against Donald Trump, her opponent was, essentially, live-tweeting a political freakout.
“IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” the former president and Republican presidential nominee posted on his platform Truth Social about 20 minutes into Harris’s acceptance speech. That was about the point when she turned away from giving her family history and tracing the biographical milestones that brought her into politics to go after Trump’s criminal convictions and civil liabilities and calling him “an unserious man.”
“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails. How he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States — not to improve your life,” Harris said in her address. “But to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.”
Trump’s response? To post a supercut of Harris interview and speech clips, captioned by the question “WONDER WHY [KAMALA HARRIS] WON’T DO INTERVIEWS?”
And so the non sequiturs and spontaneous bursts of anger continued to flow from the former president for the rest of the night. “WHERE’S HUNTER?” he asked, in reference to President Joe Biden’s convicted son, as Harris talked about her upbringing in Oakland, California. “Look, it’s Crazy Nancy Pelosi looking on, saying, ‘Where’s Crooked Joe?’” he narrated at the end of the speech, when former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was shown on screen clapping for Harris as the balloons dropped.
It didn’t end there. He’d proceed to call into Fox News and Newsmax telecasts to “discuss Marxism in America” — trying to zero in on one complaint (“why didn’t she do the things that she’s complaining about?”) before spinning out into a variety of grievances as he seemed to accidentally press a bunch of different buttons on his phone’s keypad as he talked.
In a way, Trump’s reactions last night are a throwback to some of the classic Trump traits that defined his 2016 campaign and presidency: the angry tweets, the rambling press conferences, the tiffs with journalists, and the attempts to throw anything at the wall and see what sticks. It can appear chaotic and messy from the outside, but then again, this all worked in 2016 and nearly worked in 2020. How this all plays out in 2024, against a fresh Democratic candidate who Trump has struggled to define, remains to be seen.
And that seems to be the biggest effect that Harris’s speech has had on Trump: to scramble Trump’s strategy, to put him on the defensive, and to bog him down with a litany of attacks that he can’t effectively rebut.
It’s clear there are some attacks that Trump is especially concerned about. On Newsmax, he embraced the overturning of Roe v. Wade, then tried to argue for exceptions to abortion bans as he admitted that the “issue is not one that leans toward us.” He then criticized Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-backed blueprint of policy proposals for a second Trump term, as being the product of “far-right” thinkers who he wants nothing to do with — even though his own running mate J.D. Vance is intrinsically tied to the movement and the architects of this vision staffed his first administration or have deep ties to Trump’s team.
On Fox News, host Bret Baier gave Trump the opportunity to distance himself from the demise of the bipartisan border security bill Biden and Harris had worked to negotiate with Republican members of Congress. Trump’s lobbying against the bill has been a go-to cudgel for Harris and Democrats when rebutting accusations that they are weak on immigration policy and border security and criticizing Trump.
Instead, Trump embraced his responsibility. “The bill was horrible,” he said. “It was a joke. She doesn’t need a bill. I didn’t have a bill.” And he took a seemingly random dig at Joe Biden: “Now Joe is missing. He’s on a beach in California.” Then he rambled on about his visit earlier Thursday to the southern border in Cochise County, Arizona: “It’s a dangerous place. I was being told by Secret Service and a lot of other law enforcement, ‘Sir, it’s really dangerous here, I think it’s time to leave.’”
Trump’s lack of any coherent campaign message contrasted sharply with Harris’s speech and the DNC’s carefully choreographed convention. And while it’s hard to know how much that matters to voters, it certainly seemed evident to Trump’s interviewers.
Baier and co-host Martha MacCallum traded glances at each other as Trump shouted into the phone. As Trump tossed out his oft-repeated line about “many” of the “millions” of people “pouring into our country coming from mental institutions and insane asylums,” MacCallum interrupted him with another question. As Harris has worked to reconsolidate female, Hispanic, Black, and young voter support for her party, do he and his campaign have a strategy to recover his short-lived gains with these voters that polls had been showing before Biden dropped out?
“No, she’s not having success, I’m having success. I’m doing great with the Hispanic voters. I’m doing great with Black men,” he snapped back. “No, it’s only in your eyes that they have that, Martha. We’re doing very well in the polls.”
He’d then go on to praise the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, who had just appeared on Fox News. “He was very nice and he said he wants Trump to win. … I think we’re going to have a very good relationship with Brian Kemp.”
The praise was notable and a bit odd — Trump has long blamed Kemp for losing him the state in the 2020 election because the governor would not back Trump’s claims of voter fraud or attempts to overturn the election. Just a few weeks ago, during an August 3 visit to Georgia, Trump had launched into a 10-minute tirade against Kemp, calling him “a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy. And he’s a very average governor. … Little Brian, little Brian Kemp. Bad guy.”
But Thursday night on Fox News, as polls have shown a narrowing race in that state, Trump seemed to be walking back his personal insults of Kemp.
The hosts pivoted to one more topic — about the chances that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drops out of the presidential contest and endorses him.
Trump wouldn’t say if he’d accept Kennedy’s endorsement, noting that they’ll be in different parts of Arizona on Friday. But he launched into a minute-long rant (the whole interview was about nine minutes long) about how he thinks both RFK Jr and Joe Biden were treated unfairly by the Democratic Party (“they threw Joe Biden out of the party.”). At that point, the Fox hosts seemed to have heard enough and cut Trump’s interview short.
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