What is going on in the Trump campaign?

Where is the Trump campaign? We know where former President Donald Trump is. We see him holding rallies, testing messaging, probing weaknesses for better and for worse. We know where Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) is: raising money, speaking on the southern border. But what of the people Trump has empowered to provide the covering fire?

They're certainly in the news: For campaign infighting, for attacking conservative Republicans, for blasting outside support structures. But what about blasting Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee and their actual opponent in the general election?

Trump famously does what he wants, and the rest is in God’s hands. So what have the campaign staff added, exactly?

It’s striking that the first anti-Harris attack ad to go viral was a tweet by Dave McCormick’s U.S. Senate campaign in Pennsylvania. His operation was on message seemingly hours after Harris was thrust upon the Democratic Party. But where was the covering fire from the top campaign? Campaign leaders appear to have been caught completely flat-footed by the long, slow-moving public coup against Joe Biden. If that weren’t negligent enough, it took weeks for them to adjust to the candidate swap once it happened.

Trump’s campaign finally posted television ads on Tuesday, nine days after Harris’ announcement. Meanwhile, the super PACs have completely saturated every swing-state market except North Carolina. The play, one campaign ally told Blaze News, is likely for the campaign to hold fire until later in the election and let the super PACs do the work first to avoid running out of money in the final weeks, as happened in 2020.

That makes sense. PACs pay a premium — often twice the campaign's rate. Closer to the actual election, that number can rise as high as 10 times the preferred rate offered to the candidate. But the campaign has outsourced just about everything but advertising to the Republican National Committee, so what is it actually doing?

Top adviser Chris LaCivita spent Thursday tweeting attacks on Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus who lost his primary recount that day. Personal, intrastate feuds are standard fare in politics, but 31,216 conservative Republicans cast their votes for Good in a state LaCivita is paid to win in November. What’s the plan there?

That same morning, the big campaign operative story featured more than a dozen anonymous staffers pointing to longtime Trump confidante Kellyanne Conway for allegedly undermining Vance to reporters. Conway, by the way, is being paid $50,000 a month to lobby for Ukraine. Vance has been a vocal opponent of American involvement in the Ukraine war. She’s not part of the campaign but is certainly part of the noise.

The day before, LaCivita and his equal at the top, Susie Wiles, put out a letter attacking the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and, by extension, the dozens of Trump White House alumni laying the policy groundwork for a potential return. They wrote it on campaign letterhead, with Trump’s and Vance’s names at the top, and signed their names at the bottom.

Speaking of Vance, his speech on the southern border lighting into the White House’s historically abysmal border security was a rare light in a dark week. He delivered straight messaging on one of the two issues American voters have repeatedly listed as the most crucial. It was Politics 101, and it was overshadowed by backbiting distractions — and the glaring fact that the senator has been under unrelenting attack since his announcement, with nary a defensive shot fired by the campaign.

"The way they left JD unprotected against unrelenting attacks was campaign malpractice," one Trump 45 White House communications alum told Blaze News.

Granted, it’s difficult to play defense during your opponent’s honeymoon media week and when you’re focusing on Harris. But Vance is a fighter who was cloistered away to weather an unending barrage. Why wasn’t he sent to "Meet the Press" and other shows? He's more than proven his ability to hold his own.

Meanwhile, the campaign's top operatives claim they’re trying to tamp down on outside noise (Project 2025) and focus on winning. This might convince if there was a product to show for this focus on winning. Thus far, their greatest pluses were fighting for the debate, Biden being old and senile, and the candidate himself exercising message control during trials (and staying silent during Biden’s implosion). But no one believes campaign staff pulled those off. Trump famously does what he wants, and the rest is in God’s hands. So what have they added, exactly? Absent a product, it looks like two weeks spent jealously defending personal power bases.

The news media are fully mobilized for war, and a Democratic Party sitting on four years of porous borders, rampant inflation, war abroad, terrible job growth, and a nearly incapacitated president is somehow on the offensive. We’re 91 days away from Election Day. The triumphalism is over. This is a real race. Time to start running it.

Sign up for Bedford’s newsletter
Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter.

IN OTHER NEWS

In defense of Trump’s attack on Harris’ identity (and why it might sting)

By now you know Trump told a room of black journalists that Kamala Harris used to identify more with her Indian heritage than her Jamaican heritage. There was laughter in the room along with the jeers, but any sort of nuanced response ended there. The political world was aghast. How dare he!

CNN and the New York Times called Trump’s observation racist, etc. Yawn. A time traveler from 2015 called Bill O'Reilly said when you’re talking about race, you’re losing. For her part, Abigail Shrier made the obvious (and so brilliant) point that political attacks only work if they fire up your supporters more than the other team. But is that matter settled?

At its core, Trump’s message was that Kamala Harris is, at her core, a complete and total phony — and he planted that take more than three months before the election in a hysterically provocative way. WMAL and the Daily Caller's Vince Coglianese called it "bicycle-kicking the hornets’ nest."

The week’s news cycle had been devoted to Vance and childless cat ladies. Suddenly, every segment switched to the authenticity of one of the Democrats’ most sacred totems — race politics.

It ain't 2004 any more. Clapping flip-flops at John Kerry rallies isn’t going to cut through the noise. You need to be provocative to get the people going. The wild man who attacked former President George W. Bush over 9/11, Sen. John McCain over being taken prisoner in Vietnam, and the historically brilliant, famously kind, and soft-spoken Dr. Ben Carson as a violent psychopath and a bad doctor was just the man to do it.

Trump broke her stride and seized back attention. He went at the core of Harris’ person and called her a poseur. He's not the only person to think this. According to Politico bigwigs Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, even Biden quietly noticed that “she doesn’t seem to know who she wants to be.”

It’s three months until Tuesday, November 5, in a world in which the American people have already been distracted from the most famous man in the world nearly being assassinated on live TV. Keep calm and carry on. Meanwhile, the key for those normal Republican politicians caught in the riptide is not to echo his words but to use them to prosecute the more widely appealing version of the attack.

UnHerd: The political family has lost its sparkle

Spectator: The Josh Shapiro sexual harassment cover-up scandal is actually quite bad

I'll see you in a week

Just a few paragraphs after telling everyone to get to work, I'm loading the family into the truck and heading to Ocean City, Maryland, to eat blue crabs, ride big waves, and document the terrible state of the tattoos at Seacrets. I'll see you next week.