This Is Exactly What the Trump Team Feared
7 min read
On the evening of Super Tuesday, March 5, shortly before Donald Trump effectively ended the Republican primary and earned a general-election rematch with President Joe Biden, I asked the co-managers of Trump’s presidential campaign what they feared most about Biden.
“Honestly, it’s less him,” Chris LaCivita told me. “And more—”
“Institutional Democrats,” Susie Wiles said, finishing her partner’s thought.
It was a revealing exchange, and a theme we would revisit frequently. The Democratic Party, Wiles and LaCivita would tell me in conversations over the coming months, was a machine—well organized and well financed, with a record of support from the low-propensity voters who turn out every four years in presidential contests. Ordinarily, they explained, Democrats would have structural superiority in a race like this one. But something was holding the party back: Biden.
LaCivita and Wiles expected the campaign’s narrative to be controlled by Democrats from the beginning: Trump, after all, had sabotaged the peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election, incited an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and, more recently, faced numerous criminal prosecutions and the possibility of jail time. And yet Biden offered an opening. Already the oldest president in American history, he began to show signs of rapid deterioration in 2023. This would make the campaign a game of survival more than skill, each candidate needing to convince voters that he was less disqualified than his opponent.
In the race to clear historically low hurdles, Trump began pulling ahead. Polls showed him making unprecedented gains with those low-propensity demographics, specifically Black and Hispanic voters—not because of anything he was doing particularly well, but because of apathy and disillusionment within the Democratic base. As far back as springtime, the numbers told a straightforward story: Biden was not going to win. Democrats could only look on, powerless, as the president denied the party’s young bench—and its organizational machine—a chance to change the narrative.
“I don’t think Joe Biden has a ton of advantages,” Wiles told me on Super Tuesday. “But I do think Democrats do.”
She and LaCivita were right to worry.
Biden’s departure from the presidential race this afternoon—hours after his top surrogates had insisted that he would carry on—is the culmination of a remarkable pressure campaign, launched after his calamitous June 27 debate performance and aimed at pushing the president into retirement. On the Republican side, it caps a frenetic four-month stretch in which Trump’s campaign went from cocky about Biden’s deficiencies to fearful of his ouster to stunned at the sudden letter from Biden doing the thing Republicans thought he’d never do.
Republicans I spoke with today, some of them still hungover from celebrating what felt to many like a victory-night celebration in Milwaukee, registered shock at the news of Biden’s departure. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaign—one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden—against a new and unknown challenger. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race,” a clearly peeved Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “Now we have to start all over again.”
For months, in talking with Wiles and LaCivita, I was struck by their concern about the potential of a dramatic switch—Democratic leaders pushing out Biden in favor of a younger nominee. They told me that Trump’s campaign was readying contingency plans and studying the weaknesses of would-be alternatives, beginning with Vice President Kamala Harris. By the time of the debate, however, they believed that Democrats’ window had all but closed. Even in the immediate aftermath—as Democratic officials openly called for Biden to quit—Wiles and LaCivita were betting on the status quo. More than anything, Trump’s allies believed that the president’s stubborn Irish ego wouldn’t let him back out of a fight with a man he despised.
But they couldn’t take any chances. Two weeks ago, according to a campaign source who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio went into the field to begin testing the outcomes of a Harris-versus-Trump matchup. These surveys, conducted across several battleground states, represented the most concrete step taken to prepare for the possibility of a new adversary. Still, with the polling a tightly held secret—I couldn’t verify the results—there were no outward signs of Trump’s operation expecting a reset. When convention speakers reached out to the GOP nominee’s campaign, gauging whether to hedge their speeches with attacks on Harris, they were told to keep the focus on Biden.
In many ways, the convention scene was one of a party peaking too early. Campaigns are marathons measured by changes in momentum and narrative, and Republicans in Milwaukee reveled in what felt like a three-week winning streak, dating back to the debate, in which the daily churn of insider gossip focused ever more on Democratic fatalism and Trump’s seeming inevitability. No Republican I spoke with could remember a longer stretch of uninterrupted forward propulsion. And with Biden appearing to dig in, they left Milwaukee believing that this run of luck might never end.
The president’s abrupt exit dashed any such fantasy. Suddenly, Republicans who had boasted last week about expanding the electoral map—pushing into Minnesota and Virginia and other decidedly blue areas—were fretting about the possibility of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Arizona Senator Mark Kelly joining the Democratic ticket, partnering with Harris to put back into play key battlegrounds that just 24 hours earlier seemed to be out of reach.
Given the historic volatility of this campaign—Trump survived an assassination attempt just last weekend—there’s no guarantee that Harris will ultimately succeed Biden atop the ticket. The Trump campaign certainly believes she will—understandably so, given the rapid consolidation of Democratic officials around her following Biden’s announcement—and blasted out a statement Sunday afternoon that tied Harris to her unpopular boss. “Kamala Harris is just as much of [a] joke as Biden is,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement. “Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two.”
This is the essence of what Trump’s campaign believes—that any Democrat who picks up the party’s banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable. Republicans will point to historic inflation, millions of illegal border crossings, and geopolitical chaos from Eastern Europe to the Middle East as evidence that the entire Democratic Party has failed the American people. “We’ve talked about strength versus weakness, success versus failure,” LaCivita told me before the convention, summarizing the campaign’s strategic vision for the race. “The great thing about that messaging is that it’s not just unique to Joe Biden.”
But messaging is a secondary concern for Democrats. What they need first is a messenger.
It’s true that Harris will struggle to shed some policy-related criticisms; her appointment early in her vice presidency to handle the southern border, in fact, could make her even more vulnerable to immigration-related attacks than Biden was. It’s also true, however, that policy criticisms aren’t what made Biden unelectable in the eyes of most Americans. In an evenly divided and exceedingly polarized nation, Biden lost ground—with his party’s base as well as with independents—because he was perceived to be too old and infirm to serve another four years in office.
Harris is neither of those things. At 59 years old, she is two decades younger than Trump and will have no trouble keeping up with him on the campaign trail or the debate stage. She is also a former prosecutor who, if anything, is known for being too tough on crime. (Trump allies told me they plan to assault her left flank with accusations of Harris over-incarcerating young men of color when she was California’s attorney general.) At the very least, Trump’s lieutenants realize, Harris’s promotion will provide a desperately needed jolt to Democrats nationwide in the form of fundraising, volunteerism, and enthusiasm. Whatever her flaws as a politician—Harris ran a dreadful primary campaign for president in 2020, marked by organizational infighting and awkward sound bites—she does not possess the one flaw that proved insurmountable for Biden.
Trump’s campaign insists that nothing has changed. Wiles and LaCivita are telling their team that given the obstacles Trump has already overcome—prosecutions, a conviction, an assassination attempt that nearly killed him—a new nominee for the Democrats is just another log on the 2024 inferno.
But they know it’s more than that. They know that from the moment they partnered with Trump, everything they intended for this campaign—the messaging, the advertising, the microtargeting, the ground game, the mail pieces, the digital engagement, the social-media maneuvers—was designed to defeat Joe Biden. Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.
The mentality of this Trump campaign, LaCivita once told me, is to spend every day on offense. The team wants to shape the pace and substance of every news cycle and force Democrats to react, ensuring that key battles are fought on the GOP’s chosen terrain. It worked so well that Biden was ruined before his party’s convention. Now the Trump operation is vowing to destroy Harris—if in fact she becomes the nominee—in much the same way.
And yet, for a campaign that went to bed Saturday believing it would dictate the terms of the election every day until November 5, Sunday brought an unfamiliar feeling of powerlessness. For the first time in a long time, Trump does not control the narrative of 2024.
