Team Trump’s Desperate New Attack Plan on Harris in Swing States

A pro-Donald Trump super PAC is preparing a $100 million dollar ad campaign hoping to smear Vice President Kamala Harris as a left-wing “lunatic” to voters in swing states.

MAGA Inc., a super PAC that has previously been used to financially buoy the Trump campaign as its candidate hemorrhaged funds across his legal battles, will launch a series of ads targeting Harris, according to a memo obtained by Politico on Monday.

The ads will paint Harris as a “soft-on-crime radical who is too dangerous for the White House,” according to David Lee and Chris Grant, MAGA Inc.’s top political strategists. Specifically, they will focus on Harris’s immigration policies and her prosecutorial record, one person familiar with the plan told Politico.

“Americans might vote for a liberal, but they won’t vote for a lunatic,” the memo said.

One of Trump’s senior advisers previously said that Trump’s campaign planned to dig up “several Willie Hortons” from Harris’s prosecutorial record, a reference to a series of racist ads from the 1980s, with which to attack the vice president.

The new ad blitz is timed to coincide with the Democratic National Convention, which will take place next week in Chicago. The ads will target voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, all crucial battleground states.

Last week, Trump claimed that while he was lying low at Mar-a-Lago, as his running mate J.D. Vance trailed Harris across the country, he’d kept busy working on “commercials that are at a level that anybody’s ever done before.”

Trump’s forays into political ads on Monday are already proving unfocused at best, detrimental at worst. When Trump posted a new advertisement on X Monday, the move sent shares in Truth Social tumbling to their lowest level in months. Another Trump ad released Monday levied its attacks against President Joe Biden, not his actual opponent, Harris. Another ad inexplicably implied he would have been endorsed by former President Ronald Reagan.

Donald Trump’s social media network is losing money just as the former president and convicted felon has resumed posting on X (formerly Twitter).

Trump Media & Technology shares dropped to $24.60, their lowest price level in months, after Trump posted on X early Monday for the first time in more than a year. Shares may drop even further as Trump is supposed to sit down for an interview with X CEO Elon Musk Monday night.

The plummeting stock comes after many investors bought shares in the media company hoping for a boost during the 2024 election, with a possible Trump victory netting an even higher increase. Trump Media reported a loss of $16 million in its first full quarter as a publicly traded company Friday, earning just $836,900 for the period ending June 30.

It’s the latest run of bad news for Truth Social, which is rapidly losing users. It was expected to be an easy money grab for Trump, who owns 60 percent of the company. But even the company’s net loss of $58.2 million in 2023 had to be reaudited after its accounting firm was charged with “massive fraud.” At the very least, Trump Media’s meager numbers last quarter were a huge improvement from the previous one, when it lost an astonishing $327.6 million and only brought in $770,500 in revenue.

Trump is stuck with his company’s stock for just one more month, when he is legally allowed to sell his shares without board approval. He can’t try to increase the share price by bragging, as he did with his real estate properties, because that would be illegal.  Even though the Supreme Court gave him a break with its immunity ruling, he still needs cash to pay his mounting legal bills. It’s only a matter of time before September arrives and Trump dumps his stock. The question is, how low will the share price be?

Donald Trump returned to X (formerly Twitter) ahead of a one-on-one interview with Elon Musk Monday. But rather than elevate that, or attack his current opponent’s policies, one of Trump’s first ads directed at his 88.1 million followers on the platform appeared to narrowly focus on President Joe Biden.

The roughly two-minute video—captioned “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!”—attempted to frame Trump as a candidate primed for election since 1987, when he was still a major New York City developer.

“In the ads, he says there’s nothing wrong with American foreign policy that a little backbone won’t cure,” a dated broadcaster can be heard saying at the ad’s opening.

As the music escalates, Trump can be heard claiming that he and his followers will “determine the course of America, and the world, for many, many years to come.” The convicted fraudster—who also announced his intention to sue the Justice Department to the tune of $100 million for the FBI raid on his Florida estate—argues in the video that he’s the antidote for corruption at the highest levels of government.

But by the end of the ad, it’s clear that Trump has not yet found a proper angle of attack against his new Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Instead, the ad directly calls out Biden, reiterating outdated polls that found Trump to be leading the former nominee.

Unfortunately for him, that’s no longer the current state of the race. Since Harris and Tim Walz joined the opposite ticket, Trump has seen a dramatic slip in support, including from white men—the bulk of his base—despite his attempts to pander to them this election cycle.

Trump has also upset white supremacists, with one popular pro-Hitler livestreamer publicly revoking his support for Trump on Friday, announcing on social media that he and his allies were declaring a “groyper war” against the Trump campaign over the belief that the candidate was headed toward a “catastrophic loss.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s number two pick—Ohio Senator J.D. Vance—has also proven remarkably unpopular with voters, with 62 percent of surveyed voters noting they were “bothered” by Vance’s abortion stance and his description of rape and incest-caused pregnancies as “inconvenient.”

Donald Trump’s former senior adviser Peter Navarro has doubled down on his pleas to the former president, begging him to stop making superficial attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Navarro, who previously served a four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena in the January 6 investigation, spoke about Trump’s bad strategy Monday while guest hosting the War Room podcast, which is normally captained by Steve Bannon. But Bannon is currently serving his own four-month prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena in the January 6 investigation.

“The Trump rally 1.0 has always been a fast-moving feast,” Navarro explained, a generous characterization of Trump’s falsehood-filled, meandering public speaking gigs.

“Trump doesn’t need feast now, he needs votes, and the current rally formula is simply not sufficiently focused on the very stark policy differences—policy differences—between him and Kamala Harris that will swing voters in key battleground states,” Navarro said. “Instead, when Trump attacks Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris’s support among swing voters rises, particularly among women. It’s just a fact of life, right now.”

Amid Harris’s increase in the polls, and apparently groundswell of support, Trump has appeared to lean into making personal attacks against the vice president. He’s tried out several lame nicknames, accused her of deciding to become Black, and falsely claimed that her campaign used A.I. to create the appearance of a massive crowd.

Navarro’s message for Trump to get serious about opposing Harris was echoed in statements from former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who appeared on Fox News Monday.

“You’ve got to make this race not on personalities,” McCarthy said. “Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position when it comes to what did she do as attorney general on crime. Question what did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as the czar. Question that they brought inflation [down], and she was the tie-breaking vote when it came to inflation, when it came to IRS agents.”

McCarthy called Harris the “perfect person to run against.”

“You thought John Kerry was a flip-flopper? She has the biggest flip-flop, with the most extreme positions, and you’ve got a short time to do it. So, don’t sit back, get out there, and start making the case, and use her own words to do it,” McCarthy said.

Not only is Elon Musk inviting Donald Trump to return to X (formerly known as Twitter) for an exclusive interview with him on Monday, he’s also now pushing Trump’s advertisements on the social media platform.

As advertisers continue to flee X, Musk is happy to elevate campaign ads from the @realDonaldTrump account. Musk is also promoting the hashtag “TrumpIsOnX” ahead of the interview Monday evening.

One of the promoted ads begins with a montage of the former president being pursued for his various crimes, from the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago to his felony charges for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. “The only crime I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it,” his voiceover says.

“I will totally obliterate the deep state,” he declares as videos of him with military personnel flash on-screen. 

Other ads also include a Ronald Reagan deepfake and Andy Warhol–esque black and white film of Trump walking toward the camera complete with an action movie soundtrack. 

If Trump’s return to X after nearly a year wasn’t enough cause for concern, his strange conspiracy-laden videos should be. On Monday night, the Republican presidential nominee is set to speak with X owner Musk on the platform’s “Spaces.”

Last year, Musk tried to livestream on Twitter Spaces with former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, a disastrous event plagued with continuous technical glitches that still couldn’t distract from the Florida governor’s horrible vibes. At the time, Trump made fun of Musk and DeSantis for the failed event. It looks like Musk’s promise of campaign cash changed Trump’s mind.