Former President Donald Trump is facing a wave of calls from Republican supporters to focus his political attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris on policy critiques, and to scale back his ad hominem insults and conspiracy theories.
“The path forward is to focus on policy. Those are three words for the Republican Party that I think is a path to success: Focus on policy,” former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said on NPR Tuesday.
“I think Donald Trump has a strong case on all of those counts, and I think he and the Republican Party would be well served to focus on the policy contrasts,” said Ramaswamy, who endorsed Trump after dropping his own White House bid earlier this year.
“The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see: It’s fewer insults, more insights and that policy contrast,” Kellyanne Conway, a former Trump White House, said Monday in a Fox News interview.
Conway, who managed Trump’s winning 2016 campaign, appeared with fellow Trump White House alum Larry Kudlow, who also had some advice for Trump: “Don’t wander off, don’t call her stupid and all kinds of names, stay on message.”
Pleas like these from loyal Trump supporters have echoed through Republican circles in recent days, as the party grapples with the new dynamics of a presidential race against Harris, three weeks after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
As Trump tries to pivot, his talking points against Harris frequently devolve into personal attacks. They include making false claims about her racial identity, insulting her intelligence and commenting on her appearance. He has also promoted false conspiracy theories about the crowds at Harris’ huge rallies.
“When Trump attacks Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris’s support among swing voters rises, particularly among women. It’s just a fact of life, right now,” said Peter Navarro, a former Trump White House aide, on the conservative WarRoom podcast on Monday.
Navarro is a loyal Trump ally and former aide who recently served four months in federal prison for defying a congressional subpoena in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection probe.
“You’ve got to make this race not on personalities. Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her positions,” former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said earlier Monday in an interview on Fox News.
The Trump campaign rejected the notion that the former president has not focused enough on policy attacks.
“President Trump prosecuted the case against Kamala Harris for over two hours yesterday in a record-breaking conversation on X Spaces,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to CNBC, referring to the former president’s conversation with Elon Musk on Monday evening.
“He spoke about how weak, failed, and dangerously liberal the [Harris]-Walz ticket is, the most radical in American history. In every single speech, President Trump lays out his bold vision for this country through his America First agenda and contrasting that with [Harris’] dismal record of skyrocketing inflation, an out-of-control border, and surging crime in American communities,” he added.
Focusing on Harris’ positions is difficult, in part because she has yet to define them. Harris has not released a formal policy platform, but she said over the weekend that her campaign plans to release one in the coming days.
Still, Harris’ entry into the race has produced a boom of enthusiasm among Democrats, marked by record-setting donations, significant polling gains and arena-sized rally crowds.
Trump has long been fixated on crowd sizes, both his own and his opponents, and he considers them a metric to measure political momentum.
Harris drew crowds of more than 12,000 people at each one of her five rallies last week, according to her campaign. It’s a feat with few parallels in modern U.S. politics.
On Sunday, Trump falsely accused Harris of using AI technology to create photographs of her supporters gathered around Air Force Two in Michigan last week for a rally. News outlets quickly verified that the crowds were real with video footage and scores of photos from the scene.
Earlier in the week, Trump had also claimed that he draws, “10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size” that Harris does.
During that more than hour-long press conference, Trump falsely attributed Harris’ rise in the polls to her gender, and he again questioned her racial identity.
The comments did not go over well with Gerard Baker, The Wall Street Journal’s influential Editor at Large, and a staunch conservative who has backed Trump in the past.
“By my calculation, about one-third of Mr. Trump’s remarks fell into three categories: false, obtuse or lunatic,” Baker wrote in a Monday op-ed.
In the meantime, Trump has not signaled that he intends to change his tack.
