The GOP’s new worry: Trump can’t drive a coherent message

Biden didn’t even mention Project 2025, for instance, despite its quickly emerging as a leading Democratic talking point. And that was a big problem, especially with Trump suddenly more popular than he’d been in many years. Trump said repeatedly that Harris and Walz were bad on issues, but often without saying how or even clearly describing the issue. He dwelled on process and polling, as well as Biden and Harris’s replacement of him, rather than Harris herself. And he for whatever reason didn’t even summon Walz’s name — referring to him as Harris’s pick, the “new governor from Minnesota” (Walz was first elected six years ago), the “Minnesota gentleman” and Harris’s “new friend.” (Sometimes politicians avoid naming their opponents while lodging attacks, but Trump was perfectly happy to cite Harris by name, repeatedly.) Advertisement Just as Biden failed to invoke Project 2025, Trump didn’t even mention many of the biggest potential sticking points for the Democratic ticket. There was nothing on Harris’s 2020 campaign support for banning offshore drilling and fracking, or her approving comments about the Green New Deal and “starting from scratch” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On Harris’s past support for a mandatory gun buyback program for assault weapons, Trump said twice simply that Harris wants to “take away” people’s guns. He also briefly mentioned Harris wanting to “defund the police.” (Harris’s past comments sympathized with the defund-the-police movement but didn’t explicitly advocate defunding the police.) Advertisement That the other things went unmentioned was particularly astonishing given that many of them feed into the same themes Trump sought to play up: inflation, energy prices, immigration and crime. He mentioned “what they’ve done to the national reserves.” “The Strategic National Reserves is, as you know very well, because you cover it, but what they’ve done is incredible,” Trump said. “They’ve just — for the sake of getting some votes, for the sake of having gasoline, you know, that’s meant for wars. It’s meant for, like, tragedy.” Left out? About the closest he got to saying how was a brief reference to “no cash bail, weak on crime.” (In fact, Harris’s push to eliminate cash bail came after she left those state positions; she had previously pushed for higher bail amounts in some cases.) Advertisement Trump was asked, “How you are going to go after Black voters now that she is the nominee?” He proceeded to summarize his poll numbers and express confidence, before landing on this recipe: “I think ultimately, they’ll like me better because I’m going to give them security, safety and jobs; I’m going to give them a good economy.” Trump referenced Harris having attacked Biden in 2019, saying she was “nasty with the — calling him a racist, and the school bus and all of the different things.” The “school bus” reference appeared to be Harris attacking Biden’s past stance on busing Black students to different schools. Advertisement And with Republicans hitting Walz for a “trans refuge” bill that protected access to gender-affirming care, Trump merely said the Minnesota governor was “heavy into the transgender world.” (He followed that by accusing the Democratic ticket of being “heavy into lots of different worlds, having to do with safety” — whatever that meant.) Trump summarized: “These guys get up — think of it: We’re going to give you no security, we’re going to give you a weak military, we’re going to give you no walls, no borders, no anything, we’re going to — all these things they’re doing,” Trump said. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/09/gop-trump-message/