Former President Donald Trump defended his running mate and said his campaign needs to “work hard to define” Vice President Kamala Harris during a Saturday rally in Georgia, a battleground state that has taken on new importance in the wake of the shake-up on the Democratic ticket.
After spending the entire campaign cycle attacking President Joe Biden and largely ignoring Harris, the Trump campaign is now trying to craft its messaging to blunt Harris’ momentum after her quick ascent to become the presumptive Democratic nominee.
“Now they’re saying, ‘Oh, isn’t she wonderful, isn’t she wonderful?’ No, she’s not wonderful,” Trump told the crowd in Atlanta. “So we have to work hard to define her.”
Earlier this week, Atlanta symbolized exactly how much the race had changed since Biden stepped aside and endorsed Harris to become the Democratic nominee.
After she’d locked up the support of party delegates and announced that she’d raised more than $200 million in her first week as a candidate, Harris rallied 10,000 supporters in the city’s Georgia State University Convocation Center, telling them that her path to the White House ran through the Peach State.
Trump and running mate JD Vance campaigned in the same venue Saturday but headed into the event without the fundraising spike, increased momentum or improved chances of winning a crucial state.
In his remarks, Trump sought to blunt some of that momentum and defend his beleaguered vice presidential nominee, who he said is doing a “great job.”
“They go after JD, you know why? He’s for the worker,” Trump said Saturday. “And frankly, they are people that have been taken advantage of, and he doesn’t like it, and he’s done great, everything we could have expected and much more so.”
A pivotal state
Four years ago, Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia in nearly 30 years when he beat Trump by just under 12,000 votes.
Trump was indicted last year by a Georgia grand jury on charges surrounding his efforts to overturn the results of that election, including a call asking Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” the exact number of votes he needed to win.
But, up until two weeks ago, Georgia – along with the other Sun Belt states of North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada – appeared to be drifting toward Trump, who was coming off a successful Republican convention with a new running mate. Polls were showing him ahead and suggested that his campaign’s effort to chip away at Biden’s support among Black voters, specifically young men, was bearing fruit.
Now, however, the Harris campaign has argued that she is appealing to Black, Latino and younger voters in a way that could broaden the map beyond the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In the hours leading up to the rally, Trump said he would not participate in an ABC News debate on September 10 that he’d agreed to earlier this year when Biden was still the nominee. Instead, he had said he would debate Harris on September 4 on Fox News or not at all. The Harris campaign said Saturday she would attend the ABC News event, regardless of Trump’s plans.
“We’re doing one with Fox, if she shows up,” Trump said Saturday in Atlanta.
Trump also renewed his attacks on Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, whom he repeatedly referred to as “disloyal.” Kemp has been a top target for the former president over the past few years since his decision to certify Georgia’s 2020 election result. Trump recruited former Sen. David Perdue – who was in the audience in Atlanta on Saturday – to challenge Kemp in a 2022 primary, only for the governor to beat him decisively.
On his Truth Social platform on Saturday, Trump slammed Kemp and his wife, Georgia first lady Martha Kemp, who earlier said she would write in her husband’s name instead of voting for the former president in November. “I don’t want her Endorsement, and I don’t want his,” Trump wrote, calling the governor “a bad guy.”
Kemp responded on social media Saturday by posting a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post and telling the former president to “leave my family out of it.” Kemp revealed last month that he hadn’t voted for Trump in the state’s GOP primary earlier this year but said he would support the GOP ticket in November.
A new landscape
As Democrats rallied around Harris over the past two weeks, the Trump campaign has struggled as it seeks to figure out how to talk about Harris and justify Vance’s place on the ticket as the Ohio senator faces more scrutiny.
Republican leaders have warned party members to keep their criticisms of Harris focused on policy, not race or gender, after several Republican lawmakers called her a “DEI hire,” using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion. The Trump campaign appeared to be pushing a similar focused message, spending more than $12 million this week on ads tying Harris to the current administration’s handling of border security, with a tagline calling her “dangerously liberal.”
But when the former president appeared at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists on Wednesday, he shocked the Chicago audience and many of the Black voters he is seeking to appeal to when he falsely claimed that Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, “happened to turn Black” suddenly to court voters.
Those remarks have been met with exasperation from many Republicans – who just two weeks ago had been touting a message of party unity following the Republican convention.
“I think what the country would hope for - certainly what I’m hoping for in the campaign - is a discussion on the issues and the polices,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski told CNN’s Manu Raju this week. “You’ve got two campaigns that are presenting very, very different views on these issues. So, let’s talk about the issues.”
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said the campaign should focus on drawing policy contrasts.
“I’ve known the vice president for a while – she’s always embraced her heritage proudly, as she should,” Graham told CNN. “My problem with Vice President Harris is the policy choices she’s made.”
Trump, however, is not shying away from the controversial and false claims about Harris’ heritage. Instead, he has doubled and tripled down, posting online and amplifying further conspiracy theories regarding her identity.
A senior Trump campaign official told CNN that the campaign would not “shy away” from the former president’s comments. Rather it plans to use them as a new line of attack framed around Harris being a “phony.”
“You can expect similar messaging in Atlanta,” the adviser said.
Meanwhile, Vance backed Trump up while campaigning in Arizona this week, using the “phony” line against Harris and claiming that she “caters to whatever audience is in front of her.”
The Ohio senator’s defense of Trump comes after the campaign has spent weeks pushing back on criticisms of Vance’s past comments arguing that people with children should have more voting power and dismissing women without kids as “childless cat ladies.”
Weeks ago, Vance’s selection was seen as a play to the MAGA base and a youthful counterbalance – Vance turned 40 on Friday – to Biden and his age-related struggles.
But with Biden gone, and Vance’s history of making disparaging remarks about childless people coming to light, the campaign has already sought to reintroduce him two weeks after his primetime convention debut.
This story and headline have been updated.
CNN’s Andrew Millman, Manu Raju and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.