Trump faces questions about getting out-worked by Harris

Since the Republican National Convention concluded July 18, former President Trump has held five campaign rallies. 

Vice President Harris will hold that many this week alone.

Democrats and Harris campaign aides have reveled in the contrast in schedules, using it to stoke questions about Trump’s stamina and taunt him with Harris’s large, enthusiastic crowds.

It’s a drastic shift from when President Biden was in the race and would travel to campaign roughly once a week. It has led some Republicans to suggest Trump will need to ramp up his presence in battleground states to keep pace, even as the former president bristled at the idea that he’s lying low.

“I think it’s a legitimate question why Trump’s not doing more events,” said one Republican strategist who requested anonymity. “He’s not a young man himself. He's going to need to step it up.”

Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as Trump's White House communications director in before becoming a critic of the former president, put it more bluntly.

“Kamala Harris is massively out-working Trump,” she said this week.

Harris this week has traveled to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona, and she is scheduled to visit Nevada before the week is over. The vice president postponed planned stops in North Carolina and Georgia due to Tropical Storm Debby.

While the Harris campaign barnstorms the battleground states likely to decide November’s election, Trump is only holding one campaign event this week: A rally on Friday night in Montana, a state he won by 16 percentage points in 2020 that is home to a hotly contested Senate race in the fall.

“Low energy, @realdonaldtrump?” Harris’s campaign posted on X alongside a photo of their respective schedules for the week.

Trump on Thursday scoffed at a question during a press conference about his lack of public campaign events this week.

“What a stupid question this is,” he said, rolling his eyes.

He explained his general absence from battleground states by saying he’s “leading by a lot and because I’m letting their convention go through,” referring to the Democratic National Convention, which does not begin until Aug. 19. “And I’m campaigning a lot."

Trump cited campaign commercials, radio interviews, television interviews and other media engagements as evidence of the work he's doing.

Asked about criticism of his light campaign schedule, a Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to Harris’s lack of media engagements and policy platform.

“It's been 18 days since Kamala was installed as the Democrat Nominee and she has not answered a single question from the media, her campaign website does not list a single policy proposal, and she denied President Trump's challenge to debate on September 4th,” Trump national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Kamala is desperately trying to run from her dangerously liberal record."

With Trump largely remaining in Florida this week, the campaign has had his running mate shadowing Harris across battleground states. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has held events in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, using smaller settings to take questions from reporters and attack the vice president and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) on their records.

Trump himself has done a series of interviews to try and take back headlines from the Harris campaign. He sat Monday for an interview with online streamer Adin Ross and called in Wednesday to “Fox & Friends.” Trump held a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Thursday, and he teased a Monday conversation with his supporter and billionaire Elon Musk.

Election Day is still three months away, but Trump’s pace of traveling for roughly one rally per week is significantly slower than in 2016, when he held nine rallies during the first week of August. The 2020 campaign was impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, but Trump was typically holding at least three rallies a week by September.

“I think Trump is continuing the pace of his campaign that he established six months ago,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns. “And look, it worked for him until a few weeks ago. The pace of one or two events per week worked when he was making this campaign a referendum on Biden.”

It’s unfamiliar territory for Trump, who is used to dominating the headlines and appeared on track to win back the White House in November in a race against Biden.

Harris has generated significant media attention by drawing the largest crowds of any Democratic event this campaign cycle in recent days. 

Polls have also shown a tightening race, with Harris expected to get another bump from this month’s convention. A Decision Desk HQ/The Hill average of national polls shows the two candidates essentially tied, and the two candidates are separated by less than 3 percentage points in the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

“I think Trump's kind of lethargic response to Kamala Harris, there is an element that I think people forget of his presidency and his past campaigns where if things aren’t going his way he kind of goes into a doom spiral,” said Jesse Lee, a former senior official in the Biden White House.

“It was easy for him when he was dead certain he’s going to win, and I think he’s been dead certain he was gonna win against Biden for a year,” Lee said. “So he hasn’t really been in the pressure cooker situation in that question of whether he’s going to lose.”