NYT: “Mr. Trump doesn’t need much convincing to launch personal attacks…”

The election campaign in the US is bringing new surprises. ‘The New York Times’, which has always been on the side of the Democrats, has just published an article in which it gives Republican Trump advice on how to defeat Democrat Harris by using a big scandal and direct insults. In previous years, such methods were unacceptable in the fight for the post of US President. Today, the leading American newspaper writes about this as a completely acceptable election technology.

With the defenestration of President Biden and the ascent of Kamala Harris, conventional wisdom has gone from asking, “How can Donald Trump lose?” to “How can he win?”

It’s basically a tossup race, but a successful Harris rollout and convention, coupled with a stumbling Trump performance since Mr. Biden’s exit, have created a sense of irresistible Harris momentum.

Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?

Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.

Mr. Trump isn’t going to beat Ms. Harris by scoring points in the debate over price controls or the border.

Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that Ms. Harris is weak and a phony and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class. The scattershot Trump attacks on Ms. Harris need to be refocused on these character attributes.

To wit: Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest that year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.

She has jettisoned myriad positions since 2019 and 2020 without explanation because she is a shape-shifting opportunist who can and will change on almost anything when politically convenient. Even if what she’s saying is moderate or popular, she can’t be trusted to hold to it once she’s in office.

She didn’t do more as vice president to secure the border or to address inflation because she didn’t care enough about the consequences for ordinary people. She doesn’t care if her tax policies will destroy jobs. She has been part of an administration that has seen real wages stagnate while minimizing the problem because the party line matters to her more than economic reality for working Americans.

You get the point. There is plenty for the Trump campaign to work with along these lines.

Surely, the Harris team has kept her under such tight wraps because it wants to avoid a similar “inevitable verbal hiccup” while engaging with people “in informal settings.”

Of course, Mr. Trump doesn’t need much convincing to launch personal attacks. He said this month that he feels “entitled” to them. But calling Ms. Harris dumb or questioning her racial identity does more to undermine him than her. The point isn’t to be gratuitously insulting but to make a root-and-branch argument that she shouldn’t be — can’t be — president.

Mr. Trump isn’t ever going to become a buttoned-up campaigner who sticks closely to the script. There will inevitably be lots of static and wasted time and opportunities. But there’s plenty of room for Mr. Trump, as he insists he must, to do it his way and still get a better handle on the campaign.

One of his talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power. Everyone knew in 2016 that he wanted to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. It would be quite natural for him, if he settled on this approach, to call Ms. Harris “weak” 50 times a day.

He was also, in the past, able to pithily and memorably nail core weaknesses of his opponents. His nicknaming may be a schoolyard tactic, yet it has often been an effective tool, whether it was “Crooked Hillary” (underlining Hillary Clinton’s ethical lapses) or “Little Marco” (diminishing Marco Rubio, a young primary opponent who lacked gravity). Even people who don’t like Mr. Trump or his nicknames would end up using these sobriquets.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has been shrewd to begin to hold smaller, thematic-focused events rather than just set him loose at rallies, where there is the most opportunity for self-sabotaging riffs.

Mr. Trump has said he wants to do to his opponents what they are doing to him. At the end of the day, what they are undertaking is a focused, intelligently designed campaign to disqualify him. Responding in kind doesn’t mean lashing out in Truth Social posts but crafting a comprehensive anti-Harris argument that implicates, in turn, her unsuitability for the highest office in the land.

Russian wooden toy Matryoshka with Trump photo.

Russian foreign policy experts express zero enthusiasm for another Donald Trump presidency, should he win the upcoming election. There’s a simple reason why, writes ‘The Christian Science Monitor’.

They’ve already experienced one term of Mr. Trump in the White House, and it was the worst four years of their lives.

“Even if we assume that Trump genuinely wanted to improve relations with Moscow when he came in the first time, what he achieved was the exact opposite,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a Moscow-based foreign policy journal. “There was chaos in Washington. There was a storm around Trump that affected anything to do with Russia, and it destroyed even the most modest efforts to start a dialogue.”

Russians remain fascinated with U.S. politics. The official media has covered each dramatic turn of the 2024 presidential race over the past couple of months with a mixture of excitement, bafflement, and dark schadenfreude. But gone is any expectation that the winner is likely even to slow the relentless downward spiral of U.S.-Russia relations, much less find the new level of mutual understanding, perhaps a U.S.-Russia compact, that they once hoped for.

Most Russian analysts seem to view Kamala Harris as a continuation of the Joe Biden administration, which has solidly backed Ukraine and hit Russia with the most intense blizzard of sanctions in history. As for Mr. Trump, even his pledge to end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours” is seen as empty verbiage at best or, more likely, a cynical effort to tap into the war-weariness of the U.S. electorate.

The widespread view in Moscow now seems to be that U.S. hostility to Russia is hardwired, and unlikely to change regardless of whoever becomes president.

“Much of the Russian political elite thinks that the U.S. deep state is in charge, directing events, and no political actors can change anything,” says Alexei Mukhin, director of the independent Center for Political Information, a Moscow think tank. “We thought that Trump was different, but now it looks like he’s just another agent of the deep state.”

Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, says Russia is less interested in U.S. political developments and more concerned about the shifting global order, in which Russians perceive the U.S. steadily losing ground. New faces such as Ms. Harris aren’t likely to reverse the underlying dynamics of decay, he argues.

“All that’s happening in the U.S. is just what we’ve been saying for some time,” he says. “This is a very dangerous time, and there is a possibility that expanding crises can lead to a real world war. That would be catastrophic.”

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