Donald Trump has clearly struggled to adapt to the new presidential race against Vice President Kamala Harris, and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman says there are “two things” that are rattling the former president.
“Number one, she’s closed the polling gap with him in a pretty short amount of time, and he had gotten very used to running against Joe Biden. That was comfortable for him,” Haberman told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday.
“He knew what the line of attack was, and his campaign had spent a lot of time and money on it. But she is a woman, and she is a Black woman, and both of those factors have proven pretty challenging for him in the past.”
“His allies will say he is an equal-opportunity offender and he goes after everybody — and it’s certainly true that he insults a wide variety of people — but he has seemed to really struggle with women opponents, women critics and particularly Black women who are critics,” she added.
In the weeks since President Joe Biden ended his candidacy and Harris took up the mantle, Trump has questioned Harris’ racial identity, used several bizarre nicknames for her, told easy-to-debunk lies that footage of her massive rally crowds were created with artificial intelligence, and strangely compared her appearance to that of his wife, Melania Trump.
According to a Saturday New York Times report by Haberman and Jonathan Swan, the Republican nominee has also called his Democratic rival a “bitch” and “nasty” in private.
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Haberman said it’s clear that Trump and his campaign are “trying pretty hard to bait her and to bait Democrats into a fight about race.”
“And, you know, that has been something so far that Harris campaign has not taken the bait on,” she added.
Despite pleas from some Republicans and donors to stay on message, Trump’s camp has seemed unable to resist race-based attacks. On Tuesday, the Trump campaign posted a racist tweet implying that suburban neighborhoods would be overrun by Black people and immigrants if Harris was president.
The journalist also noted that Trump “is so disoriented [that it] has left him pretty susceptible to being manipulated.”
“He has a lot of people around him who either support conspiracy theories or don’t like what they see as the establishment, or are critical of certain kinds of Republicans,” she said. “And when he is feeling cornered, he tends to listen to those people. He is clearly feeling cornered right now.”
Trump’s erratic behavior is akin to how he’s acted in previous periods of strain or anxiety, she noted, adding, “the number of people who we have spoken to who just say that he seems very on edge, is not small.”