How Kamala Harris Knocked Donald Trump Off Course

The two candidates for President of the United States are as different as any duo in history. A billionaire businessman versus a career prosecutor and politician; a son of privilege against the daughter of a middle-class single mother; one reckless, one cautious; a former commander in chief against the first Black and South Asian woman to claim the nomination. They hail from different coasts, different generations, different tax brackets. But as stark as the choice facing American voters this November may be, the nation had never gotten a glimpse of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris side by side before they squared off in Philadelphia Sept. 10, in what may be their sole debate before Election Day.

For the Republican, the U.S. is a hellscape of rising crime, unchecked immigration and economic misery. For the Democrat, the nation is beset by the division Trump has sowed, the abortion bans he ushered in, and the economic policies he passed that favor the rich at the expense of the rest. But beyond the canned salvos and campaign boilerplate, the high-stakes clash underscored how dramatically the presidential race has changed since mid-summer, when even top Democrats conceded Trump appeared to be sailing to victory in his rematch with President Joe Biden. As plain as it is that Trump wishes he were still running against Biden, it is equally apparent that Harris has rattled him.

The split-screen said it all: Trump glowered and grimaced, spewing old grievances and strange new attacks. The former President repeated a baseless Internet rumor that migrant invaders were killing and eating pet dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and claimed that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.” With sharp ripostes and canny traps, Harris baited Trump into boasting about his crowd sizes, grousing about the 2020 election, and standing up for the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol to thwart the peaceful transfer of power. In the nine years since Trump first burst onto the scene, no opponent—Democrat or Republican—has dealt with the 800-lb. gorilla of American politics as coolly, or gotten under his skin to such a degree.

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Which is how it’s been going for Trump for a while now. Despite weeks of speculation that Harris was poised to replace Biden at the top of the ticket, Trump and his campaign were caught flat-footed, left lurching from one attack line to another. More than once, top aides thought they had settled on a strategy, only to see the candidate himself upend it on the fly. According to a person close to Trump, the level of campaign infighting and backstabbing rivaled the 2016 operation, an infamous snake pit. Facing a new opponent, Trump reverted to his old ways.

In a matter of weeks, Trump frittered away his commanding position. Harris’ smooth debut galvanized the Democratic base and unlocked a fund­raising behemoth that dwarfed that of Trump and his allies. In the handful of pivotal swing states, her campaign is building on formidable operations she inherited from Biden, and boasts a striking advantage in cash and reserved ad time between now and Election Day. “I think everyone was caught off guard by the way it shifted so dramatically,” says a person close to Trump.

For all that, the race remains deadlocked. The polls show Trump and Harris effectively tied across the battle­ground states with both sides of the electorate more enthusiastic about voting this fall than they were earlier this year. Despite her deft consolidation of power and surge of support, Harris remains undefined for many Americans. And for all his late-­summer stumbles, Trump is in a stronger position now than at this stage of the race in either 2016 or 2020.

The biggest variable in the final weeks of the campaign may be Trump’s trademark indiscipline. The campaign operation that brought him to his peak in July remains in place, layered over with late arrivals more inclined to “let Trump be Trump.” The candidate himself has cut deals for support with once-unlikely allies like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk, and continues to test new attacks against Harris in search of one that will stick. Either he will become only the second President to win back the White House after defeat, or he will author one of the most dramatic political collapses of modern times.

Less than 24 hours before everything changed, an exuberant Trump stood on a rally stage in Grand Rapids, Mich., cracking jokes next to his new running mate, J.D. Vance. Trump asked attendees if they’d rather he run against Biden or Harris. The crowd cheered their preference for Biden, who was at that moment huddled with advisers in Rehoboth Beach, Del., mulling an exit from the race. A day later, Biden was out, Harris was mobilized, and Trump’s bravado evaporated.

Behind the scenes, the former President was livid and disoriented at the abrupt turn of events. “Obviously, we had to ditch a bunch of stuff, and then overnight start new attacks,” says a campaign official. Trump fumed at how the media was covering Harris’ entry into the race, griping that “they never talk about me that way,” according to a second campaign official. Trump felt like he was being punished for vanquishing his opponent 108 days too early. After a July on offense, the campaign spent August on defense, explaining away Vance’s past statements about “childless cat ladies” and clumsily making amends with Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, just weeks after Trump bashed him for not backing the baseless claims that the former President really won the 2020 election.

Trump, who previously reduced opponents to punch lines with pithy nicknames, tried out and then ditched multiple ones for Harris. Laffin’ Kamala. Lyin’ Kamala. Crazy Kamala. None seemed to land like he wanted. More recently, he’s favored Comrade Kamala. “It’s like a boxer with his guard up trying out jabs,” says a former Trump aide. “I think it has taken him a while to get there with Kamala.”

As Harris gained in the polls, bringing battleground states that tilted toward Trump into a dead heat, tensions within the campaign bubbled into view. Trump brought in sharp-elbowed loyalists from his previous runs, including 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, signaling a new power struggle afoot. Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee co-chair and the former President’s daughter-­in-law, says Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles are still running the campaign’s strategy, as they have for more than a year. The return of Lewandowski, she says, represents a revival of the “scrappy” character of Trump’s first campaign. “He brings back some of the spunk from 2016,” she says.

For many Republicans, the only shift they want to see is an end to Trump’s sexist and racist attacks on Harris. Trump has said world leaders would treat her like a “play toy” and amplified crude comments about her on social media that implied she had traded sexual favors to help her political career. At a gathering of Black journalists, he claimed Harris only recently “happened to turn Black.” Bringing up how Harris frames her identity was a targeted effort to charge Harris as inauthentic, says the person close to Trump. He said, ‘OK, no one is hitting her, I’m just going to do it myself,’” the person says.

Read more: The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris.

That explanation doesn’t fly with Republican strategists and conservative movement leaders, many of whom have pleaded with Trump to steer clear of such comments and focus on the issues. “Don’t give people an opportunity to vote emotionally,” says a frustrated GOP operative working on the Trump election effort. The candidate appears unmoved. During an Aug. 21 rally in Asheboro, N.C., he drew laughs as he mimicked his advisers telling him, “‘Sir, please stick to policy, don’t get personal,’” and joked about firing them.

Podcaster Lex Fridman made one of the most direct efforts to get Trump to tone it down, telling him in an interview this month that he was more effective offering a positive vision for the future rather than criticizing Democrats. The former President rejected the premise. “Yeah, I think you have to criticize, though,” Trump said. “I think they’re nasty.”

Many Republicans now seem more resigned to Trump doubling down on his divisive strategy through Election Day. “Trump should be talking issues, not throwing personal insults all over the place,” says Charlie Black, a veteran Republican strategist who was a senior adviser on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “But he won’t do that. He doesn’t appear capable of it.”

In the minds of Trump defenders, the critics are looking at the situation all wrong. Trump enters the final stretch of the race with a clearer path to victory than in either of his last two campaigns. In the Real Clear Politics polling average for must-win Pennsylvania, he’s tied, whereas he was down 4.3% at this point in 2020 and 6.2% in 2016. Georgia and North Carolina are effectively tied, but advisers believe he is the favorite to pull out both traditionally red states. If Trump takes those three battlegrounds, campaign officials argue, the election is his. Polling in the last two elections, they note, underestimated his support. On the other hand, argues Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, there’s been a different pattern since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022: “Republicans have underperformed public polling and expectations and we've overperformed.”

That it’s even this close is a cause for optimism insist Trump confidants. “This is all during Kamala’s salad days, her debut, her convention, her selection of the running mate, her monster fund­raising numbers,” says Kellyanne Conway, a former Trump aide who still advises him. “If you look at the metrics during the last five weeks, she should be leading him everywhere, and she’s not.”

They also note some moves by the Trump campaign since Harris’ entry, most prominently persuading Kennedy to drop his independent bid and endorse Trump after weeks of prodding from Donald Trump Jr. and venture capitalist Omeed Malik. While Team Harris believes that Kennedy’s blessing will alienate moderate voters who recoil from the conspiracy theorist, Trump’s orbit believes it will coax more voters into their column. “By him coming off the ballot in some of these places, that is a benefit to the Trump team,” says Lewandowski.

In the coming weeks, Trump officials tell TIME, the campaign’s strategy is to continue to cast Harris as a far-left chameleon while keeping the focus on immigration, the economy, and crime—the issues on which Trump polls best. They also intend to make better use of resources they squandered in 2020, including a vote-by-mail operation targeted to boost Republican turnout. Vance will be deployed as “the disciplined policy attack dog,” says a campaign official.

Read more: How Far Trump Would Go.

Trump, on the other hand, has adopted a different media strategy: interviews with podcasters who are popular among young men, such as Fridman, Shawn Ryan, and Logan Paul. Trump may be the first major candidate to so aggressively court the “frat vote”—a cohort of men below the age of 30 who could tip the scales in swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. At the same time, the campaign is planning a tour of female surrogates to target suburban women voters. If the campaign wasn’t as ready for Harris as it should have been in late July, says Trump ally Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, “they are now.”

Trump’s team is betting that his singular approach to politics can produce another victory. They know their strategy is vulnerable to the whims of their boss—someone who has long trusted, above all, his own instincts. Wiles and LaCivita may have built a disciplined operation designed to get him over the line, but in the final stretch, Trump is surrounding himself more and more with a rotating cast of loyalists who are encouraging him to embrace his impulses.

Squared off against his new opponent on stage in Philadelphia, those impulses sent the former President careening into trouble. By the end, Trump looked like a man flailing for a solution to an opponent he has yet to figure out, while Harris continued her tidy policy pivot to the center. Her closing statement espoused a vision of unity, strength, and shared prosperity. His was a bitter lament. “We’re a failing nation,” he said. “We’re laughed at all over the world.”

But the clearest sign that Trump’s bid for a return to the White House may be in trouble came after the debate ended. His top advisers claimed victory in a prepared statement hailing his “masterful” performance. Harris’ immediately asked for another showdown next month.—With reporting by Nik Popli/Washington

Correction, Sept. 11

The original version of this story mischaracterized as false Donald Trump's statement accusing Kamala Harris of supporting “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison” As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.