How MAGA World Is Taking On Its New Opponent

Last week, early on Wednesday evening, a mass-casualty-evacuation transport bus idled outside the Bojangles Coliseum, in Charlotte, North Carolina, where people were collapsing from heatstroke while waiting in line for a Donald Trump rally. A few minutes before Trump entered the arena, Steven Cheung, the campaign spokesman, came down to the media risers, where he was practically pinned against a wall by reporters asking how the race had transformed now that the former President faced a new opponent in Kamala Harris. Only a week before, at the Republican National Convention, Trump was put forth as the heroic leader of the nation, while President Joe Biden, who was being abandoned by his party, recovered from COVID; it was easy to see why Trump’s circle had been so confident. But now the press was asking Cheung how Trump intended to keep a competitive travel schedule with someone twenty years his junior. A NewsNation reporter, referring to a viral Charli XCX-Harris meme, asked, “Is Trump brat?”

“No,” Cheung said. He insisted that the race remains the same: “Trump will be Trump.” (Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s national press secretary, later reiterated in an e-mail to me, “Our strategy hasn’t changed.”) They were putting up a good front, but the late-breaking switch-up on the Democratic ticket was rattling to a campaign premised on defeating Biden. “Shouldn’t the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud,” Trump asked, on Truth Social, soon after Biden stood down. A wall at Trump’s campaign headquarters, in Florida, has been stencilled, for months, with the phrase “Joe Biden is: Weak, Failed and Dishonest.”

As Harris was stepping “into the spotlight, reintroducing herself on her own terms,” as the Times put it, Trump was presenting her to his party. “She is a radical-left lunatic who will destroy our country,” he said, in Charlotte. Chris LaCivita, the Trump campaign’s co-manager, told the Bulwark, “We see her as a candidate now, and we’re holding the bucket of paint to define her at a time of our choosing.” On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that Trump and his allies are outspending Harris’s team twenty-five to one on TV and radio attack ads in August. Since then, the pro-Trump Super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc. has added thirty-two million dollars’ worth of ad buys in battleground states.

In Charlotte, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” was playing, and people wore new, post-assassination-attempt Trump shirts that read “Grazed but Unfazed” as they signed up for poll watching and poll working. “Nothing will change,” Larry Pigg, a former Army pilot wearing a Confederate-flag patch, told me. “It’s not a different race. He’s still running against the same policies. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. The Democrat flag is still the ISIS flag.” Tommy Rudd, a retiree in line for Bojangles concessions, said, “It’s a one-legged race. The other person ain’t got a leg to run on—whoever it might be.” (There is still speculation in MAGA world that the Democrats might swap in a different candidate.)

“Women ain’t got no place in politics,” Rudd added. His friend Thomas cut in. “None of this is reality,” he said. “Their best chance would be to bring in Big Mike.” Big Mike? “Michelle Obama.” (Many rally-goers told me that the Obamas, the Clintons, and the deep state had already been running the country during Biden’s term, and that Harris’s hefty fund-raising—her campaign has brought in two hundred million dollars in its first week—could be explained away as contributions from George Soros and China.)

“I believe this will be the most negative campaign in my lifetime,” Frank Luntz, the longtime pollster, said, the day after Biden ended his bid for reëlection. “God help us all.” LaCivita and his co-manager, Susie Wiles, wrote, in a memo to campaign staff, “The left and deep state have pulled out all the stops in their maniacal attempts to retain power. . . . This ‘War on Democracy’—will be stopped by the man who took a bullet for Democracy.” On the day of the rally in Charlotte, a Times analysis counted more than sixty Republican representatives, senators, and governors who maintained that Biden’s withdrawal as the presumptive Democratic nominee “amounted to election subversion or a bloodless coup.” Citizens United, the conservative nonprofit, along with sixteen state Republican parties, filed a complaint against the Harris campaign with the Federal Election Commission, claiming that her inheritance of funds raised for Biden amounted to “ill-gotten gains.” Andy Ogles, a congressman from Tennessee, has already introduced articles of impeachment against Harris for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

At the Bojangles Coliseum, Trump said that he was supposed to have become nice after getting shot. “If you don’t mind, I’m not gonna be nice,” he said. The crowd roared. Harris was “a radical crazy person,” he said, and her coronation as the nominee was illegitimate: “It’s like, you know, ‘Trump is killing this guy! All right, out! Let’s bring in a new one!’ ” He continued, “So much for democracy. . . . She had no votes.” He then accused Harris of “perpetrating the biggest scandal in American political history.” Trump was now more than ever the candidate running to save democracy, and support for Harris was just a conspiracy between the élites and the press. In the crowd, a child unfurled a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.

Trump has also been able to retool one of the subjects he spends the most time on—open borders and “Biden migrant crime”—by introducing Harris as the true perpetrator of the border crisis. “Kamala Harris wants to be the President for savage criminals,” Trump said. “I will be the President for law-abiding Americans.” (The day before the rally, Trump held a call with reporters advertised as “Failed Border Czar Kamala Harris’ Border Bloodbath,” where he spoke alongside Brandon Judd and Paul Perez, the former and current presidents, respectively, of the National Border Patrol Council, who bashed Harris’s record on immigration.) In Charlotte, Trump brought Judd up to the podium, and then Michael McHale, the president of the National Association of Police Organizations, who endorsed him onstage and sent a press assistant running to hand out leaflets on the law-enforcement community’s support for Trump.

The rally had the feel of a season première; no more Sleepy Joe. Trump emphasized that Democrats are the party of chaos, radicalism, and lunacy, while his is the party of “common sense.” (At the R.N.C., “common sense” was printed on signs and held up alongside ones that read “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!”) During his ninety-minute speech, he stayed consistent—migrants coming from “insane asylums,” men in women’s sports, electric cars are the worst, Biden won in 2020 because the Democrats cheated like hell—but wove in his freshly devised attacks on Harris. The crowd was rapt, not even looking at their phones. It was fun, it seemed, to have a new enemy, and the rally-goers were just as excited (if not more) to fire Harris than they were to fire Biden. “She’s to the left of everybody,” Alyson, a preschool teacher there with her mother, told me. “She has no loyalty or credibility. She comes out for criminal-justice reform, but she’s put so many people in jail. I don’t think anybody can save her campaign. This is the Democrats’ ‘Oh, shit’ moment—they have to pretend to be excited about it.”

In a meeting of House Republicans, the National Republican Congressional Committee chairman, Representative Richard Hudson, of North Carolina, and House Speaker Mike Johnson had implored the Party not to attack Harris’s gender or ethnicity. But internally, there is talk of “Willie Horton-ing” Harris by, among other things, drawing attention to cases she oversaw as a prosecutor. Before landing in Minnesota for a rally in St. Cloud on Saturday night, Trump’s campaign released a new ad linking “pro-criminal” Harris to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which she tweeted in support of during Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. The campaign accused the nonprofit bail fund of bailing out “now-convicted rapists, assaulters, and murderers” and releasing them “back onto the streets.” At the rally, Trump referred to Harris as “crazy liberal”; her stance, in his words, was, “If you kill somebody, that’s O.K.”

During one of Trump’s long riffs, I wandered out to the mouth of the arena, where I met Angel, a teacher of kids with disabilities, wearing a striped shirt, who was there with her husband, children and infant grandchild. “She’s talking about Trump, so he has to defend himself,” Angel said, of Harris. “He’s pointing out policy, not character.” Onstage, Trump was describing MS-13 gang members cutting women up into pieces. “I just come to these to have fun,” Angel said. It was the beginning of what would become Trump’s chorus on Harris—“Her deadly destruction is disqualifying”—seeping into people’s minds.