Donald Trump has clearly struggled to adapt to the brand new presidential race in opposition to Vice President Kamala Harris, and New York Occasions reporter Maggie Haberman says there are “two things” which might be rattling the previous president.
“Number one, she’s closed the polling gap with him in a pretty short amount of time, and he had gotten very used to running against Joe Biden. That was comfortable for him,” Haberman advised CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday.
“He knew what the line of attack was, and his campaign had spent a lot of time and money on it. But she is a woman, and she is a Black woman, and both of those factors have proven pretty challenging for him in the past.”
“His allies will say he is an equal-opportunity offender and he goes after everybody — and it’s certainly true that he insults a wide variety of people — but he has seemed to really struggle with women opponents, women critics and particularly Black women who are critics,” she added.
Within the weeks since President Joe Biden ended his candidacy and Harris took up the mantle, Trump has questioned Harris’ racial identification, used a number of weird nicknames for her, advised easy-to-debunk lies that footage of her huge rally crowds have been created with synthetic intelligence, and unusually in contrast her look to that of his spouse, Melania Trump.
In line with a Saturday New York Occasions report by Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the Republican nominee has additionally known as his Democratic rival a “bitch” and “nasty” in personal.
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Haberman mentioned it’s clear that Trump and his marketing campaign are “trying pretty hard to bait her and to bait Democrats into a fight about race.”
“And, you know, that has been something so far that Harris campaign has not taken the bait on,” she added.
Regardless of pleas from some Republicans and donors to remain on message, Trump’s camp has appeared unable to withstand race-based assaults. On Tuesday, the Trump marketing campaign posted a racist tweet implying that suburban neighborhoods can be overrun by Black folks and immigrants if Harris was president.
The journalist additionally famous that Trump “is so disoriented [that it] has left him pretty susceptible to being manipulated.”
“He has a lot of people around him who either support conspiracy theories or don’t like what they see as the establishment, or are critical of certain kinds of Republicans,” she mentioned. “And when he is feeling cornered, he tends to listen to those people. He is clearly feeling cornered right now.”
Trump’s erratic conduct is akin to how he’s acted in earlier durations of pressure or nervousness, she famous, including, “the number of people who we have spoken to who just say that he seems very on edge, is not small.”
