Trump Camp Is Planning to ‘Willie Horton’ Kamala Harris
Can the campaign—and the candidate—stay focused on her record rather than her race?
DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN IS PREPARING a full-scale blitz on Vice President Kamala Harris, with broadsides on her record that borrow from the ad that came to define dog-whistle politics.
The question is not just whether it will work, but whether Republicans—including the former president himself—will have the discipline to keep the racial subtext of their new strategy from becoming the text.
In the 24 hours since Joe Biden announced he was ending his re-election campaign, Trump and his fellow Republicans have been put on the defensive for the first time in more than a month. Their response was broad, flailing, and conspiratorial, accusing Democrats of staging a coup, suggesting the president faked his COVID diagnosis, and even floating the notion that Biden might be dead.
The frenetic reaction left Democrats gleeful, confident that Harris had scrambled a race that seemed static. But it also belied the game plan that the Trump campaign and its allied groups have been crafting for this very scenario, in which the vice president suddenly took center stage.
“We see her as a candidate now, and we’re holding the bucket of paint to define her at a time of our choosing,” Chris LaCivita, the Trump campaign’s co-manager, told The Bulwark. “She owns the Biden record. We’ve got everything ready for what she did as [District Attorney in San Francisco]. And she was part of the coverup with Biden’s fitness to serve.”
The Trump campaign’s internal polling indicates that Harris’s involvement in Biden’s immigration policy and her record number of tie-breaking votes on Biden’s various spending bills, including the Inflation Reduction Act, are vulnerabilities, according to campaign insiders familiar with the research. But they see her real weaknesses in specific elements of her record as a prosecutor and her positions on criminal justice issues more broadly.
In the weeks ahead, the Trump campaign is signaling that it plans to focus on a Minnesota bail fund Harris supported while a presidential candidate during the George Floyd protests in 2020; her 2004 refusal to seek the death penalty for a man who murdered a San Francisco police officer; and the decision by her district attorney’s office in 2007 to give probation to a man who went on to commit a brutal assault.
A Harris spokesman pointed to a news story showing that the probation given to that man, DeVaughndre Broussard, was consistent with the punishment for first-time offenders, and that the individual who killed the San Francisco police officer got a life sentence and didn’t walk free.
That spokesman, Ammar Moussa, said it was Trump’s criminal record that would haunt him.
“Vice President Kamala Harris has held criminals accountable her entire career—and Donald Trump will be no different,” Moussa said.
One Trump adviser dubbed the Harris cases “several Willie Hortons,” relating them to the infamous attack ad against presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, who was Dukakis’s running mate, and Democrat Jesse Jackson both criticized the ad as racist. The spot reshaped the politics of criminal justice for years to come, according to the Marshall Project.
Trump has not yet mentioned those episodes from Harris’s past. That might be because he’s still focused more on Biden (or at least his Truth Social posts are), or it could be that he’s waiting for a more opportune time to focus on Harris. He also has a tendency to ad-lib when it comes to launching attacks against his opponent—often using his social media account as a personal bullhorn to amplify whatever he has seen on the news.
In conversations with The Bulwark, Trump advisers say the attacks on Harris’s record are focused on the outcomes of her policies, not race. Prior to Biden’s withdrawal, the Trump campaign was attacking the president for a number of killings by migrants allowed into the United States in the past three years. Trump’s current pollster and adviser, Tony Fabrizio, was one of the Republican operatives involved with the Willie Horton ad.
Trump has not shied away from injecting race squarely into politics. A quick Google search will return a plethora of examples that have been roundly criticized: He helped spread the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, attacked the judge in the Trump University case as “Mexican,” and has consistently used epithets like “racist” against black prosecutors and lawyers in his civil and criminal trials that he doesn’t use against white lawyers. As president, he reportedly distinguished between immigrants from Northern Europe and those from “shithole” countries like Haiti and the countries of Africa.
Given the former president’s inclinations, Trump confidants and advisers are bracing for the candidate to ratchet up the rhetoric beyond what the campaign had planned and move from defensible criticisms of Harris’s record into open racial animus.
“Trump leads this campaign,” said one. “So we’re ready for him to call her a DEI hire by Biden, and we’ll see what we see when that happens.”
Race was already playing an important role in the Trump campaign prior to Biden dropping out. The former president picked JD Vance as his running mate in part to stem the hemorrhaging of support from white males Republicans suffered between 2016 and 2020. Vance’s first campaign ad in 2022 mocked critics for calling conservatives racists over restrictionist immigration policies.
While Trump advisers believe the racial issues that benefited the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 have abated, the election dynamics have taken on a new dimension with Harris—the first black woman vice president and the likely first black woman to run for president as a major party nominee—atop the ticket.
On Monday, Vance showed the challenges of running a race-related campaign when he went off script at a hometown rally while trying to criticize Democrats for calling voter ID racist.
“Democrats say that it is racist to believe—well, they say it's racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today. I’m sure they're going to call that racist, too,” he said, to scattered applause.
The Harris campaign’s Twitter account quickly highlighted the video clip and Vance’s “awkward laughing.”
Harris’s entry into the race has given Democrats a new sense of enthusiasm about the campaign, with the vice president raising more than $80 million in the 24-hour period after Biden announced he would end his bid.
Trump-world believes that the glow Harris enjoys now will eventually be replaced by a harsh spotlight. “She’s going to have her honeymoon,” said a Trump campaign official. “But all the happy-happy will go away when she has to talk about her record.”
Going after Harris won’t represent an abrupt turn for Trump world. For months, the former president’s campaign had prepared to target Harris, even with Biden atop the ticket. A month before the debate, the Trump campaign put together two confidential memos gaming out scenarios in which Democrats would replace Biden on the ticket.
Though they initially believed Biden would survive his disastrous debate, their attitude changed as Democrats piled on the president to leave the race. By Thursday, some Trump aides had grown certain of the shakeup to come. Trump adviser Brian Hughes was among them. In earshot of MAGAville at the Republican convention, he bet a GOP congressman that the president would quit the ticket within four days.
As the likelihood of Biden dropping out became apparent, the Trump campaign began beefing up its opposition-research book and poll-testing ways to attack Harris. Among other questions, the campaign explored how much voters identified the vice president with the administration’s failures, whether they take her seriously, and the degree to which they think she’s a “California liberal,” according to insiders familiar with the research.
To move more quickly through the honeymoon phase, the Trump campaign is likely to accelerate its plans for advertising on TV. It spent next to nothing on paid ads in the general election because Biden, unlike Harris, is so well-defined, according to those who know the campaign’s strategy.
But one minute after Biden announced his withdrawal on Sunday, the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. posted a new adon Twitter. The group announced the spot would air in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona as part of a $5 million buy.
On Monday, Trump insisted to CNN that it “will be easier to beat” Harris. But elsewhere, it seemed evident that he wasn’t pleased with the positive press Harris received, and that he wanted to face the 81-year-old Biden instead.
“Now we have to start all over again,” Trump complained.
It would be rich for convicted felon to try to run on a prosecutor not being tough enough on crime.
It underscores the box Trump is in right now. It’s much easier for Harris to make this a referendum about Trump than Trump trying to make up a reason for this to be referendum on Harris beyond a desperate dog whistle.
The difference is Harris can appeal to real threats of Trump 2.0 (previous corruption, criminal indictments, dangers of Project 2025, impact of Dobbs decisions and Trump Supreme Court) that scare people a lot more than racial dog whistles.
Add to it, Willie Horton attacks weren’t direct. Trump (and Vance) can’t help themselves. Their racist and misogynistic comments on Harris will backfire in 2024.
I don't think it'll work as well as it did in 1988 because she's not running against George HW Bush (if she were, the election wouldn't be close). She's running against a felon, not a decorated World War II veteran with decades of public service to the country, and she is going to make sure that every American knows that he's a felon.