Kamala Harris’ closing message is unclear, Donald Trump dominates media by going off script

Donald Trump has settled on a closing message, but it’s not clear what final impression Kamala Harris wants to leave with voters in the last two weeks. 

Trump, as I’ve reported, has boiled it down to immigration and the economy. Of course, the former president has also wandered off script to talk about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia and calling Harris a “s*** vice president,” as well as stealing the limelight with his fry-cookery at McDonald’s.

Harris is running a conventional Democratic campaign and not making much news, which is a problem for her – even as National Review’s Jim Geraghty says the GOP portrayal of her as a dunce is wrong and she could win.

As best I can piece together, the vice president is emphasizing two things in this final stretch. One is abortion rights, a post-Roe wild card that obviously favors Democrats, accusing Trump of lacking compassion.

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Former President Trump appears to be settling on immigration and the economy in his closing message to voters – despite flying wildly off-script at times while doing so. Vice President Harris’ pitch is far less clear. (Getty Images)

The other is, well, that she’s not Trump. Harris now calls him “unstable and unhinged” in nearly every appearance.

That’s fair game, as candidates have slimed their opponents since the beginning of the republic. And struggling candidates often use fear to discredit their opponents, on the theory that you may not love me, but this other guy is far worse and will destroy our country.

But we’ve known since the day after Joe Biden stepped aside that the now-60-year-old veep was running as the anti-Trump. And it’s not like her opponent doesn’t hurl invective at her. But even with her amped-up rhetoric, and the fodder that Trump himself provides, saying he’s a threat to democracy has been in her playbook all along.

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And it just so happens that the media are suddenly filled with pieces questioning the 78-year-old’s mental acuity. What a contrast with the journalistic silence over Biden’s declining fitness until his disastrous debate with Trump, which forced him, under Democratic pressure, out of the race.

I can tell you from my Trump Tower interview that he did not seem tired, and whether you liked his answers or not, he was cogent. What made the biggest news was his defense of describing Jan. 6 as a “day of love” and naming Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff as “the enemy within,” the latter being two clips that set up punchlines for Jon Stewart at the “Daily Show.” 

Schiff fired back with an X posting, and a spokesman for Pelosi denied his remarks about her turning down the National Guard in a statement to Rolling Stone.

Her chief surrogate at the moment is Liz Cheney, who sacrificed her political career to crusade against Trump. This is ironic, of course, since most Democrats despised Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney (who has also endorsed Harris), both for the Iraq War and their hard-right views.

At a town hall meeting in Michigan – three questions from the audience – Harris also took three questions from the press, though the journalists had been preselected by her staff.

Cheney’s pitch: “If people are uncertain, if people are thinking, well, you know, I’m a conservative, I don’t know that I can support Vice President Harris, I would say: I don’t think anybody’s more conservative than I am, and I understand the most conservative value there is, is to defend the Constitution.”

Republican former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President and Democratic lightning rod Dick Cheney, appears to be the Harris campaign’s chief political surrogate at the moment. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

She added: “We all know, everyone who watched January 6 knows, you know, what Donald Trump is willing to do. He lost the election — he tried to overturn it and seize power.”

Cheney is the symbol of other prominent Republicans who are backing Harris, including several former Trump administration officials, almost as a permission slip for crossing party lines. But Harris, while moving to the center, hasn’t changed one policy that would appeal to such voters, or challenged liberal orthodoxy, and hasn’t been able to name one major thing she would do differently than Biden.

After her testy exchange with Bret Baier, Harris did an interview with activist/pundit Al Sharpton, who openly supports her, that made no news. She denied having a problem with Black men, though everything she has been doing – visiting Black churches and restaurants, sitting down with Charlamagne Tha God, rallying with Lizzo – shows her campaign believes she does.

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The upshot is that Harris is having trouble making news, or at least new news, against a man who can seize headlines every couple of hours.

Trump acknowledged to me in our Mar-a-Lago interview that he sometimes uses inflammatory language to generate media attention. That’s why he does it. With Politico dubbing this “the genitalia campaign,” Trump knew his discussion of Arnold Palmer’s junk would cause cries of outrage by the other side, but that locker-room talk would also appeal to some men.

The Donald’s brief stint at McDonald’s was so striking that it was replayed again and again. Harris was adept enough to say that she supports an increase in the federal minimum wage and Trump does not. 

Trump’s brief stint at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s reverberated in mainstream media circles this weekend, to the tune of amusement and ridicule alike. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

And, yes, it was a totally staged stunt. News flash: Politicians have been using symbolic backdrops or doing working-class jobs roughly forever. Big deal. The New York Times shed new light by finding a friend who says she worked with Harris at a specific Bay Area McDonald’s in 1983. 

And yet, media detractors cited this, and his profanity, and him swaying to music after turning a town hall interrupted by two medical emergencies into a concert, as evidence he is “losing it.”

Trump has now scored an upcoming interview with Joe Rogan, guaranteed to make news with the incredibly influential podcaster who once vowed never to put him on; I don’t know what became of Harris’ discussions to sit down with Rogan.

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Harris, for her part, did sit down with Hallie Jackson for an interview airing last night on “NBC Nightly News.”

Asked a series of reasonably tough questions, Harris again made no news. Her first answer was that she would not continue the Biden presidency and mentioned price-gouging. Does she see sexism in the gender gap among men? She sees men and women at her events. No sexism at all? “I don’t think it’s that way.”

When Jackson said “your messages haven’t connected with them yet,” she pivoted to “Trump would terminate the Constitution.” She said she would not make concessions on abortion rights. She passed up an opportunity to criticize Elon Musk.

What if Trump prematurely declares victory? “This is a person who tried to undo a free and fair election, who incited a mob to attack the Capitol.” In short, nothing she hasn’t said before.

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If Kamala is going to change the national perception of her by doing something surprising or stunning, by breaking away from her mostly practiced answers, she’s got a dwindling number of days to do it. She may have raised a billion dollars for a powerful ground game, but at this point it all comes down to the closing message.