CNN —
The Sunday after the June 27 presidential debate, top advisers to Donald Trump went to bed expecting the Democratic handwringing over President Joe Biden’s performance to cool and give way to a fresh cycle of headlines at the start of the new week.
But when they awoke the next morning to the Democratic calamity intensifying, they began the early plotting for the extraordinary potential scenario of Biden stepping aside.
Behind the scenes, between preparing for a convention and a nation-rattling assassination attempt, they also studied up on the field of potential Democratic contenders, polled Trumpagainst a would-be replacement and began soft launching more attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris,believing her to be the most likely heir-apparent.
Now, with Biden announcing he won’t run for reelection, the seeds of that work are already on display. Within hours of Biden dropping out of the race and endorsing his vice president on Sunday, Trump’s campaign managers had released a blistering statement tying Harris to the administration’s policies. Meanwhile, an aligned super PAC has reserved airtime in a handful of swing states to try to define Harris to impressionable voters as someone who enabled a clearly diminished Biden.
Trump, too, worked quickly to gain the upper hand over whoever his next opponent may be by suggesting the next debate move from the agreed-upon host network, ABC,to the friendlier confines of Fox News.
Biden, Trump wrote on social media, “was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve - And never was!”
The three-week scramble by the Trump campaign to prepare for the unprecedented may have started as a contingency but it now becomes an urgent necessity. For all the times over the past year Trump has claimed he didn’t expect Biden’s candidacy to last until November, neither he nor his campaign took serious steps to prepare for that outcome.
Instead, Trump’s team had orchestrated an exacting campaign around defeating Biden. It included millions of dollars already spent on models to predict results in key battlegrounds, putting in place a sophisticated data operation and readying an advertising blitz to contrast the two candidates. It’s a campaign built around the assumption Trump would face an 81-year-old whose physical state and mental acuity had become such an albatross that enough voters would overlook the Republican nominee’s many flaws.
Now, much of that work will be unusable or at the very least must be reimagined for a race completely altered by recent events. Whether Democrats anoint Harris or another name, Trump, the oldest major party nominee in history,becomes the candidate whose age is a concern for some voters.
“The real value (Harris) brings is simply the fact that Democrats won’t have to worry whether their nominee can meet the minimal threshold of fitness for office,” said one Republican strategist who asked not to be named to speak freely. “That means this will be a real campaign.”
Attack ads at the ready
For a time, Republicans gleefully watched the chaos unfolding on the Democratic side, and Trump for a couple weeks laid low while Biden fumbled through the fallout. But it was soon widely acknowledged within Trump’s camp that Biden bowing out would also throw their own campaign into uncertainty.
As the calls for Biden to step down hit a fever pitch in early July, the Trump campaign started researching Democratic National Committee rules and bylaws to understand the internal processes that would take place if Biden should step aside, according to a senior official in the Trump campaign.
Trump’s campaign also began privately ramping up and testing new lines of attack on Harris — someone they had largely ignored since she was sworn in as vice president. That included sprinkling new criticisms of the California Democrat into Trump’s speeches and encouraging the former president’s surrogates to do the same, according to two senior Trump advisers.
Some of those new attacks revealed themselves at the Republican National Convention last week, where Harris was easily the second-most criticized Democrat on the stage behind Biden.
Now that the moment has arrived, Trump’s team is planning a series of negative ads going after Harris’ record, not only under the Biden administration, but also during her time as a prosecutor and attorney general in California, a source familiar told CNN. The messaging will come through both the campaign and at least onesuper PAC aligned with the former president.
While polling has shown Harris is the best known among possible Democratic candidates to replace Biden, Trump’s advisers and allies maintain that most Americans don’t know much about her, creating an opening to define her to the public.
The leading pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., launched a new 30-second spot Sunday, first shared on social media, previewing the plan of attack. The accusing ad said Harris “covered up Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline.” It proceeds to include clips of Harris praising Biden’s performance as president, saying, “Our president is in good shape, in good health, tireless, vibrant, and I have no doubt about the strength of the work that we have done.”
The group, which has already spent $77 million on ads boosting Trump so far, announced plans to air the ad in the key battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita last week hinted that the campaign intends to make an issue of Harris standing by Biden in the months leading up to the debate, when the president’sperformance brought to the forefront concerns about his stamina.
“You know how much tape we have on this?” LaCivita said Thursday at an event outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Along those lines, Republicans have argued that Biden should step down immediately as president if he has concluded he can’t manage another four-year term.
Trump’s campaign and allies also plan to argue that Harris is the person in the administration responsible for the border – a key theme in GOP messaging this year – after Biden deputized her in 2021 to tackle the root causes of migration from Central America. They also intend to tie her to the country’s inflation woes and are plotting similar messaging around crime they once prepared for Biden.
“Over the last four years she co-signed Biden’s open border and green scam policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries,” Trump’s new running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance,said Sunday after Biden endorsed Harris. “She owns all of these failures.”
Unknown, though, is whether voters who for months have told pollsters they dreaded a 2020 rematch will gravitate toward a fresh face. Many voters – including ones who intended to vote for Trump when he faced Biden – have deeply held negative opinions of the former president and have expressed a desire to move on from him.
Harris also has an opportunity to reenergize Democrats who had grown disenchanted by Biden’s presidency. One veteran Republican strategist said Trump should prepare for Georgia – which Democrats had begun to believe was out of reach – to become competitive once again.
“Biden was struggling with Black voters and young voters,” the strategist said. “Seems to me that Kamala will likely do better with those groups. The question is how much.”
Brian Bartlett, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Trump could also face new headwinds in swing states depending on who is tapped to join the Democratic ticket as vice president.
“The writing’s been on the wall for a while now, so I expected they’re fairly prepared with messaging, oppo and the like,”Bartlett said. “Biggest potential challenge I see is if (Harris) picks a running mate that can bring over some of the blue wall or other key swing states.”
Already some of those names have circulated as potential vice presidential picks, including Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.
The Trump campaign had prepared dossiers on some of those individuals, believing they could also emerge as potential successors, which one of the senior advisers referred to as “binders full of research.” Other names they’ve studied include Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and congressional leaders.
But the majority of their focus in recent weeks has centered on Harris, they said, including conducting internal polling to test her in a match up against Trump, a second senior adviser said.
Asked if they had begun to test Trump versus other Democrats in surveys, LaCivita last week responded in exasperation: “We’re a capable operation. What the hell do you think?”
CNN’s David Wright contributed to this report.
