Donald Trump’s team is already strategizing to paint Vice President Kamala Harris as a repeat of President Biden after the octogenarian’s decision to drop his re-election bid on Sunday — and calling on the president to leave office immediately due to his apparent mental decline.
Biden, 81, suspended his presidential rerun after weeks of Democrats pressuring him to drop out following his disastrous debate against Trump. With four weeks until the Democrat National Convention and less than four months before the general election, Trump’s team has pivoted to tearing down Harris.
Trump’s team was quick to issue a statement saying Harris — whom Biden endorsed after his exit — was “complicit” in Biden’s “destruction of our once-great nation” and that she’s “worse” for the country than Biden.
“Kamala Harris is just as much of joke as Biden is. Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time,” top Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement. “They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two.”
“Harris must defend the failed Biden Administration AND her liberal, weak-on-crime record in CA,” they added.
The Trump team also argued that Biden’s dropout means he is a “national security threat” while he remains in the White House until the next president assumes office in January.
“Joe Biden cannot take himself out of a campaign for President because he is too mentally incompetent and still remain in the White House. Biden is a national security threat in great cognitive decline and a clear and present danger to every man, woman, and child in our country,” LaCivita and Wiles said.
“The question then to Kamala Harris is simple: knowing that Joe Biden withdrew from the campaign because of his rapidly deteriorating condition, does Harris believe the people of America are safe and secure with Joe Biden in the White House for six more months?” they added.
The Republican National Committee issued a similar statement putting Harris in the same category as Biden.
“Every single failure we’ve seen from Joe Biden — the Afghanistan withdrawal, a border crisis, crushing inflation, and America weakened abroad — has been delivered hand-in-hand with Kamala Harris. Not only would Harris be a disaster in the White House, but she also helped Biden cover up his declining health while in office, which destroys her credibility,” RNC chair Michael Whatley and co-chair Lara Trump said.
MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting Trump’s campaign, issued an anti-Harris ad Sunday afternoon saying Harris was in charge of the Biden admin, given the president was mentally gone.
“Kamala was in on it. She covered up Joe’s obvious mental decline. Kamala knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead,” the ad says.
The ad is set to air in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona immediately as part of MAGA Inc.’s $5 million-a-week advertising commitment.
With Biden’s endorsement, Harris will likely be a top choice for delegates to vote for at the DNC in August. The vice president will likely have access to the fundraising dollars the Biden-Harris campaign already has, and she has the name recognition and White House record to point to. She has already accepted Biden’s endorsement.
But other Democrats could jump into the nominating process if they wanted to in the next few weeks in an effort to create an open convention with multiple candidates at the DNC.