Kamala Harris Flips The Script On Trump

On issues from immigration to crime and even freedom itself, Kamala Harris is ceding no ground to Donald Trump.

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event at the Georgia State Convocation Center on July 30, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo credit by Megan Varner/Getty Images.

When Kamala Harris launched her campaign for the presidency just over three weeks ago, Republicans thought they were going to easily gain traction by simply attacking her on immigration.

Biden’s “immigration czar” they called her. House Republicans even passed a resolution condemning her.

It didn’t matter that there never was an “immigration czar,” nor that Harris’s role related only to the root causes of migration from Central America. All that mattered was that Trump and Republicans be perceived as stronger on immigration, and they saw an opening for an easy attack.

But then Harris flipped the script.

Beginning with her Atlanta rally two weeks ago, where she leaned into rather than shirked from the issue, and then with a new ad defining her as a “border state prosecutor” who “backed the toughest border control bill in decades,” Harris has refused to cede this ground to Trump. Even CNN’s Republican political analyst Scott Jennings had to admit:

“If you were a space alien and you landed on this planet and you knew nothing, and you watched that ad you’d say…she looks pretty tough on the border right now.”

Turning a perceived weakness into a strength has been the sort of political jujitsu Republicans—particularly in the era of Donald Trump—have mastered. Yet here is Kamala Harris effortlessly owning the most potent issue Republicans expected to be able to use against her. Trump opened that door when he pushed Republicans to oppose a strict immigration bill that their own Senate conference had negotiated.

The Harris team understands that Donald Trump is not just a remarkably weak candidate, but is uniquely bad on the very issues that Republicans have traditionally considered their strengths.

And the Harris-Walz campaign is pouncing. Not just on immigration, but on a variety of issues.

In today’s piece, I’ll look at how on issue after issue, Kamala Harris is taking Donald Trump’s weaknesses and turning them into strengths for Democrats in November. And why it’s working.

Immigration

In December 2023, President Joe Biden was reportedly negotiating a bipartisan immigration bill with the Republicans. It would grant them much of what they were demanding on immigration and border policy in exchange for their support for Ukraine funding. 

But it wasn’t just a political transaction for Biden. Polling showed him underwater relative to Trump on the issue, so it was a savvy political maneuver to essentially dare Republicans to take yes for an answer. 

From Biden’s perspective, if Republicans supported the bill and it passed, it would take off the table the very issue on which he was arguably most politically vulnerable. But if they refused to pass it, it would expose Republicans as utter hypocrites who didn’t really care about the issue except as a political cudgel.

And we all know what happened next. Against all odds, a tough immigration bill was successfully negotiated, Biden pledged to sign it, and Trump predictably scuttled it by pressuring Republicans in Congress to kill the deal.

Even conservative Senator James Lankford, who led the negotiations of the bill, admitted on Fox that Republicans bailed on it only after Trump demanded that no immigration deal pass in an election year. 

This ultimately led the White House to declare in an official statement:

Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system.

This perfectly set the table for Kamala Harris’s rope-a-dope of Republicans on the immigration issue. 

On July 30, at Harris’s first rally in Atlanta as a presidential candidate, she wasn’t three minutes into her speech when she went after Trump on immigration. Harris boasted about her own experience as a prosecutor in a border state working to convict drug traffickers, praised the bipartisan immigration bill negotiated by the Biden administration, and ripped Trump and Republicans for opposing it:

“Donald Trump has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk…”

“At the last minute, Trump directed his allies in the Senate to vote it down. He tanked the bipartisan deal because he thought it would help him win an election. Which goes to show Donald Trump does not care about border security, he only cares about himself. And when I am president I will work to actually solve the problem.

“So here is my pledge to you. As president, I will bring back the border security bill that Donald Trump killed and I will sign it into law. And show Donald Trump what real leadership looks like.”

You can watch it below:

The same day, she even released an ad on the issue:

It struck many as counterintuitive to lead with your perceived biggest vulnerability, but the way she framed it, she was recasting immigration as a vulnerability for Trump. And she didn’t stop there.

Harris’s latest ad, titled “Tougher,” goes a step further and makes the case that, as the ad concludes:

“Fixing the border is tough. So is Kamala Harris.”

By leaning into her own biography as a border state prosecutor, essentially owning the immigration issue by contrasting her record with the do-nothing former president, Harris is not just framing herself as tougher than Trump broadly, but she is actually neutralizing Trump’s advantage on the immigration issue.

Look at the Marquette Law School poll, taken July 24-Aug 1, which found Trump with a 13-point advantage on immigration over Harris. Similarly, a Big Data poll in the field on July 28, found Trump with a 14-point advantage. Then look at the Aug. 4 Marist poll, which found Trump’s advantage had been reduced to just 6 points, and then the New York Times/Sienna poll that was in the field from Aug 5-9, which found Trump’s advantage whittled down to just 5 points.

It’s a remarkable turnaround in just a short time, but it is the result of a concerted messaging effort by a candidate who has cleverly moved to define herself before Trump and Republicans could.

Law and Order

Perhaps nowhere has this been more brilliantly demonstrated than on the issue of law and order, which again, somehow Republicans have owned for far too long.

After Donald Trump incited a riot on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, after he called the rioters “hostages” and pledged to pardon them, after Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, financial fraud, convicted of 34 counts of falsifying financial documents to illegally win the 2016 election, and after he was indicted for corruptly trying to overturn the 2020 election as well as stealing classified government documents, no longer do Republicans get to claim, as Speaker Mike Johnson said with a straight face at the Republican National Convention:

“We in the Republican Party are the law and order team.”

No, here too the Harris team saw an opening, particularly with a candidate at the top of the ticket who had been a prosecutor, an elected district attorney, and the Attorney General of California, to frame the race as the prosecutor versus the felon. 

This contrast has given us one of the most satisfying political rally riffs in recent memory, which she debuted at her very first event as a presidential candidate on July 22:

After recounting her impressive law and order resume, Harris continued:

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain, So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.

And in this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his.”

Since VP Harris debuted the line at her July 22 launch event, it has been a staple of her rallies and a consistent crowd-pleaser, even as the crowds now know what’s coming.

And when Harris wins in November, it will be in large part due to the overnight transformation of the race into one where convicted felon Donald Trump’s opponent is a tough-as-nails prosecutor.

Thank you for that, President Biden.

Freedom

As long as I can remember, during my adult political life, Republicans have claimed the mantle of “freedom” as their own. When George W. Bush launched his invasion of Iraq in 2003, he appealed to Americans’ inherent sense of fighting for freedom, when he concluded his remarks:

“We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail.”

It didn’t matter, of course, that Iraq never attacked us, nor did they have anything to do with 9/11. Nor were there ever any “weapons of mass destruction” found to justify our invasion. And so when France refused to support Bush’s disastrous war, conservatives pathetically renamed “French fries”… of course, “Freedom Fries.”

Donald Trump continues to weaponize “freedom” in his own campaign, claiming he is the champion of “free speech” and proposing building “freedom cities” on federal land to 

“reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American dream.”

But the notion that the Republican Party is somehow the party of freedom has always been an absurd proposition. Republicans have opposed women’s reproductive freedom and opposed the freedom of same-sex couples to marry and start families of their own. They use the government to restrict parents’ freedom to choose the right health care for their children as well as the books they’re allowed to read. They are the “freedom for me but not for thee” party and have been for as long as I can recall.

So when Trump corruptly packed the Supreme Court with anti-choice judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, which they promptly did, removing an established constitutional right from more than half the population, he gave Democrats an opening to turn the notion of who is actually fighting for freedom on its head.

Thanks to Trump and his Christian nationalist legislators around the country, it’s Republicans who are the true enemies of freedom, and Harris saw her opportunity to make that case.

In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, Vice President Harris traveled the country to hold roundtables with reproductive rights advocates and stakeholders about the fight for abortion rights. It was widely reported as “Kamala Harris finding her voice” in the administration, and the message she was sending was summed up by the DNC’s Cedric Richmond:

“This is about an extreme Republican Party that is willing to dismantle freedoms and erode rights.”

And that’s precisely the message Harris is leading with from the top of the Democratic presidential ticket today.

When Harris says in her speeches that this campaign is about “what kind of country we want to live in,” she is literally talking about freedom vs. authoritarianism. Or to be more precise, freedom vs. Trump’s Project 2025 vision for America. 

This dichotomy is the central premise of her very first ad, in which she, appropriately, secured the rights to Beyoncé’s anthem “Freedom”—which is also Harris’s walk-on song for her rallies—and in which she powerfully reclaims the mantle of freedom for Democrats, saying:

“In this election we each face a question: what kind of country do we want to live in. There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us, we choose something different. We choose freedom. The freedom not just to get by but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty, where we can all afford health care, where no one is above the law. We believe in the promise of America and we're ready to fight for it. Because when we fight, we win.”

You can watch the ad below:

This central conflict is also a key part of her rally speeches. In her Nevada rally last week, Harris framed the race as not just a fight for the future, but as a fight for freedom, recasting the very definition of what “freedom” entails.

“Nevada, ours is a fight for the future and it is a fight for Freedom. Across our nation, we have been witnessing a full-on assault on hard won, hard fought freedoms and fundamental rights. The freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride, and the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do.”

She issued a challenge to Trump and inspired a new rally chant:

“I know the folks who are here, I know the people of Nevada. You are battle born. And if Donald Trump wants to pick a fight over our most fundamental freedoms, we say ‘Bring it on! Bring it on. Bring it on.’ Because we’re ready.”

“Generations before us led the fight for freedom. Now the baton is in our hands.”

Harris has tied this expressly to policy, stating that the Harris-Walz administration will pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act to enshrine the freedom to vote; they will pass an assault weapons ban, universal background checks, and red flag laws to enshrine the freedom to live without fear; and they will codify Roe v Wade into law to restore reproductive freedom.

You can watch her Nevada rally speech below, with the above section beginning at 16:44

Thanks to Joe Biden’s decision to step down and endorse Kamala Harris—the former prosecutor who can face down Donald Trump and Republicans on issues of crime and immigration, a pro-choice woman who can perfectly articulate what’s at stake in the fight for reproductive rights, and a longtime champion for LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights, and civil rights—we now have a candidate at the top of the ticket who is not only perfectly positioned to run against the authoritarian convicted felon Donald Trump, but is able to recast what the very idea of America is. 

As Donald Trump and JD Vance spread their message of doom and gloom, the so-called “America first” folks have given Democrats an opening and Harris is barging right through it. She has not just masterfully recast Democrats as the true fighters of freedom, but has made the case for why we should be optimistic about our country again, and dare we even say…patriotic.

In Kamala Harris’s hands, not even patriotism or the love of America is a uniquely Republican value anymore. After years of Republicans perverting and weaponizing patriotism, Kamala Harris is saying, it’s time to reclaim that too.