Trump slams Harris as an ‘ultra-liberal’ as he returns to the campaign trail under a reshaped political landscape

By Steve Contorno, Kristen Holmes and Kit Maher, CNN

Charlotte, North Carolina (CNN) — Donald Trump stepped onto the campaign trail Wednesday to an entirely new race and a political landscape once again irrevocably altered by an unprecedented election year.

The former president’s rally here was his first since President Joe Biden abruptly ended his reelection bid Sunday, setting off a chain of events that appears destined to end with Trump facing Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

Trump lost no time Wednesday turning his focus to his likely new opponent, dubbing her “Lyin’ Kamala Harris” and painting her as a “radical liberal” whom voters will reject in November.

“Kamala Harris has been the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe,” the former president told his supporters.

Biden’s decision to end his campaign and Harris’ subsequent elevation has sent a surge of adrenaline through the Democratic Party and unleashed a wave of new donations to compete with Trump’s own strengthened financial position. Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign are working to reimagine a playbook and operation launched to take on an unpopular 81-year-old incumbent.

Trump told the audience in Charlotte that he “was supposed to be nice,” alluding to his message of unity after surviving an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania the weekend before the Republican National Convention.

“They say something happened to me when I got shot: I became nice,” Trump said. “If you don’t mind, I’m not going to be nice,” he added to roars from the crowd.

“This November, the American people are going to tell her, ‘No thanks, Kamala. You’ve done a terrible job. You’ve been terrible at everything,’” said the former president, who slammed Harris over the border and inflation.

Trump also mocked Harris’ attempts to portray the race against the former president as one between a former prosecutor – Harris is a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general – and a convicted felon.

“Their campaign says, ‘I’m the prosecutor, and he is the convicted felon.’ That’s that campaign. I don’t think people are going to buy it. And we won our big case. You know, we won the case in Florida,” Trump said, referring to the recently dismissed classified documents case.

“A vote for Kamala is a vote for four more years of dishonesty and incompetence, weakness and failure,” he added.

Uncharted territory

In a campaign already marked by extraordinary events – a significant civil judgment against Trump, a felony conviction, an indictment dismissed and another delayed by a scandal in the Georgia prosecutor’s office, Biden’s confidence-shattering debate performance and the assassination attempt – the latest twist has plunged the presidential race deeper into uncharted territory.

Trump spent Tuesday reacting to his changed political fortunes. In a barrage of social media posts, the former president ripped into his likely new opponent, lamented that Republicans were forced “to waste a great deal of time and money” prior to the Democratic shake-up, suggested that the “Biden/Harris administration” was to blame for the assassination attempt on his life, criticized Democratic tributes to Biden (“He was pushed out of power like a dog,” the former president wrote) and ripped Fox News for giving airtime to the Democratic governor of Minnesota, a state Trump is targeting.

“They make me fight battles that I shouldn’t have to fight!” Trump said of the network.

Later, Trump held a call with reporters – the first of its kind this cycle – during which he tested new attack lines against Harris.

“As a result of her dangerously extreme immigration policies, the largest invasion in history is now taking place at our southern border, and it’s getting worse, not better,” said Trump, who has spent the past 19 months attacking Biden over the border while rarely mentioning Harris.

The Democratic National Committee responded to the stepped-up attacks on Harris over immigration by highlighting Trump’s successful effort to kill a bipartisan immigration deal earlier this year.

Trump’s team insists it was prepared for a change at the top of the Democratic ticket long before Biden officially dropped out, pointing to an internal memo from May laying out scenarios that would result in an open convention and another Democrat as the nominee.

Senior Trump advisers continue to suggest that a campaign against Harris would largely center on the same issues once used to criticize Biden: crime, immigration and inflation. As Biden’s second in command, Harris played a key role in shaping the administration’s approaches to those topics, they will argue.

However, some individuals close to Trump acknowledge the uncertainty brought on by Harris’ candidacy, specifically what new Democratic enthusiasm could mean for turnout in November. A new CNN/SSRS poll released Wednesday found no clear leader in a Trump-Harris matchup: The former president held 49% support among registered voters nationwide to Harris’ 46%, a finding within the poll’s margin of sampling error. Still, that was a closer contest than earlier CNN polling had found about a Biden-Trump matchup.

Trump’s campaign had been bracing for the fresh excitement over Harris to generate a bump for her in the polls, as it laid out in an expectation-setting memo Tuesday from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio. He predicted that Harris would start “gaining on or even leading President Trump” in the polls, though he also insisted that the “honeymoon” period would end.

The race to define Harris

Trump’s team faces a race against the clock to define Harris before she can fully turn the Biden election machine into her own campaign. Though polls suggest Harris is a recognizable figure, the Trump campaign remains convinced that the public doesn’t know much about her – referring to the gap as “name education.” The campaign intends to spend the coming weeks trying to fill that knowledge void with as much negative information about Harris as it can.

Fabrizio in his memo previewed what the Trump campaign is expected to attack: Harris’ record in California as a prosecutor and state attorney general; her tie-breaking vote as vice president on the Inflation Reduction Act, a law Biden championed to boost investments to reverse climate change; and her response to the rise in migrant border crossings.

A source close to Trump also indicated that the campaign and its allies are planning to specifically highlight certain choices she made as San Francisco district attorney in an attempt to portray her as lenient on violent criminals.

“So, while the public polls may change in the short run and she may consolidate a bit more of the Democrat base, Harris can’t change who she is or what she’ done,” Fabrizio wrote.

The leading pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., launched a new 30-second spot Sunday, first shared on social media, showcasing another plan of attack. The ad says Harris “covered up Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline” and features a clip of her praising Biden’s performance as president. “Our president is in good shape, in good health, tireless, vibrant, and I have no doubt about the strength of the work that we have done,” Harris says in the clip.

The group, which has already spent $77 million on ads boosting Trump so far, announced plans to air the ad in the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Trump’s appearance in Charlotte provided his first opportunity to contrast himself with Harris before voters in a battleground state. Four years ago, North Carolina produced Trump’s narrowest margin of statewide victory, and it is expected to be a top battleground again in 2024.

In a memo released Wednesday, the Harris campaign outlined its view of the candidate’s electoral path to victory, painting a much more optimistic picture beyond the so-called Blue Wall states to include the battleground states of the Sun Belt such as Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. It’s a notable change from where things stood just weeks ago when a Biden campaign memo acknowledged that those Sun Belt states were no longer as competitive.

This story and headline have been updated with additional details.

CNN’s Kate Sullivan, Sam Fossum and Betsy Klein contributed to this report.

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