Trump campaign calls Harris’ surge ‘suspended reality’

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — A top adviser to Donald Trump described the state of the race on Thursday as "suspended reality," arguing Kamala Harris will not be able to sustain her surge.

“We are witnessing a kind of out of body experience where we have suspended reality for a couple of weeks, and in that suspended reality, it's almost like Kamala Harris never met Joe Biden, you know, they were passing acquaintances,” said Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s chief pollster.

Fabrizio said the campaign will work to counter what they described as Harris acting as if “she has no responsibility for anything that happened in the Biden administration.”

Advisers to Trump met with reporters inside a hotel conference room here Thursday morning, ahead of a scheduled press conference that the former president is holding at his Mar-a-Lago club in the afternoon. The briefing was organized as Trump and his campaign attempt to shift the narrative surrounding Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket — a change in the race that has resulted in Harris out-fundraising Trump and surpassing him in some battleground state polls.

Trump, whose advisers always anticipated they would trail the Democrats in fundraising, still isn’t lacking for cash. Though behind Harris, he finished July with $327 million in cash on hand, a Trump official said, and has seen 26 consecutive days of raising more than $1 million.

A Trump official granted anonymity to speak freely said the former president himself decided to hold the press conference after hearing that reporters would be traveling to West Palm Beach on Thursday to meet with staff. Trump spent the morning making a flurry of posts to his Truth Social website about a range of issues related to Harris — including expressing anger about media coverage of the crowd sizes at her recent rallies.

The latest in Trump’s longstanding complaints about the media, campaign officials on Thursday handed out to reporters an eight-page spreadsheet listing recent headlines about Harris that they argued were overly favorable to her.

“If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes ‘crazy,’ and talks about how ‘big’ it was - And she pays for her ‘Crowd’” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website ahead of his news conference, adding that “The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”

Harris, meanwhile, has not sat for an interview since June — weeks before she announced her candidacy — and is facing mounting outside pressure to do so.

Touting him as a “ratings and earned media juggernaut,” despite recent positive coverage of Harris as the new Democratic nominee, a second Trump official said the campaign is still confident that the “Harris honeymoon” will soon come to an end.

“We hope and think that will dissipate in a few days,” the official said.

His team on Thursday discussed the fight for persuadable voters, which Trump advisers put at about 11 percent of the likely voters in target states who are seen as undecided or “soft” in their support for either candidate.

Trump officials said they believe that on policy issues, particularly economic conditions, the Republican nominee still has an advantage with those voters, who are largely young, male, nonwhite and politically moderate.

But Harris, they said, appears to be making an appeal to those voters as she distances herself from past stances on some major policy issues.

“This is fertile territory for her,” a Trump official said. “And there is an absolutely reason why she is trying to run away from everything Biden that is possible.”

And Harris, according to the official, has “been able to restore vote motivation for Democrats, at least temporarily.”

Through a range of targeted outreach to those persuadable voters, Trump campaign officials said they’re focused on painting a stark contrast between Trump and Harris to those voters.

The campaign touted its outreach to young undecided voters, in particular, by having Trump appear on podcasts whose audiences skew young, male and conservative. Earlier this week, Trump hosted 23-year-old online streamer Adin Ross, who rose to prominence among young people online after building an audience by livestreaming video games.

“They’re already inclined to want to be for us,” the official said of the sliver of persuadable voters in battleground states. “What we got to do is lock them in. We got to lock them in, and the bulk of them are undecided.”