WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has been chucking plenty of messaging spaghetti at the proverbial wall as he searches for a line of attack against Vice President Kamala Harris.

During a wide-ranging news conference on Thursday, the former president and GOP nominee threw out some new messaging noodles meant to slow the early momentum of the surprise Democratic presidential nominee. Meanwhile, at campaign stops this week in key battleground states, Harris stuck to her main arguments that Trump, if elected, would erode constitutional norms and gut popular social programs.

As Harris has taken a lead, albeit narrowly, in some national polls and made a number of battleground state polls competitive again, Trump has been mostly at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

While Harris has hit the road with her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the former New York businessman and reality television host who dubbed himself a marketing “genius” kept trying new lines on Thursday — even as he contended that his fundamental message hasn’t changed since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race on July 21.

“I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all. It’s the same policies: open borders, weak on crime. I think she’s worse than Biden,” Trump told reporters.

The Republican nominee appeared to suggest that progressives forced the career moderate Biden to adopt more left-leaning policies, and he cast Harris as being much more liberal than the outgoing president.

“Because he got forced into the position,” Trump said. “She was there long before.”

Harris and Walz, a former six-term House member who rose to be the ranking Democrat on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, have a deep record on which Trump could focus. While other Republicans have criticized Harris’ time as Biden’s point person for the root causes of illegal migration, dubbing her his ineffective “border czar,” Trump rarely stays on the issue very long when he mentions it.

Thursday was another example. He contended that Harris had been the “worst” border official in U.S. history. But moments later, he was back to name-calling and making false claims.

“She doesn’t know how to do a news conference,” he said. “She’s not smart enough to do a news conference, and I’m sorry. We need smart people to lead this country.”

‘Hope he shows up’

Yet, a few hours later, Harris took questions from reporters traveling with her on an airport tarmac in Detroit — and she verbally jabbed at him about their first planned debate, scheduled for next month.

“Well, I’m glad that he finally agreed to a debate on Sept. 10,” she said. “I’m looking forward to it, and I hope he shows up.”

Trump also could spend more time in public remarks criticizing the state of the economy under Biden and Harris or focus on her record as a prosecutor in California and then as the state’s attorney general. She caught flak from fellow Democrats during the party’s 2020 presidential primaries for, among other things, sentences she pursued for minorities. Instead, Trump zeroed in on Harris’ intelligence.

One Republican strategist, granted anonymity to be candid, said Friday that the former president’s “strategy isn’t scattershot.”

“It’s calculated because the Trump campaign is trying to get Harris and her campaign to say anything real. She has flip-flopped on every issue, from fracking to the border,” the strategist said in a telephone interview. “Harris is playing a prevent defense with only 90 days until the election. She’s trying to fake her way to becoming the 47th president and by simply not being Joe Biden. … So Trump has to try a lot of things to get her to show who she really is because time is of the essence.”

Former Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Charlie Dent said Friday that “what’s happening is we’re witnessing a fairly disciplined Trump campaign colliding with a very undisciplined candidate named Donald Trump.”

“The messaging has been scattered and meandering and unfocused,” Dent said in a telephone interview. “These personal attacks on Harris and Walz distract from what were during the press conference some very cogent points, especially on energy policy. But that gets lost.”

Asked how Trump’s performance likely played in Pennsylvania, a swing state that both campaigns see as key to their paths to victory, Dent replied, “I can’t see how, in Harrisburg or the Lehigh Valley, that press conference did Trump any favors. But that’s just who the guy is.”

‘Too lazy to fight’

Trump on Thursday used an unlikely example, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to try to cast Harris as not sharp enough to be president — despite his harsh criticism of his 2016 general election opponent.

“Hillary was very smart,” Trump said, contending the opposite of Harris. It’s a tactic he has used repeatedly during his political career, especially against women.

To the Republican strategist, that part of Trump’s performance was strategic: “You want to show America the real Kamala Harris, but you also don’t want to alienate women, so you say that Hillary’s smart.”

That voting bloc again will help decide the presidential race, as well as which parties control the House and Senate. And women voters have indicated to pollsters for more than a year that abortion access is among their top issues. Harris had been the Biden campaign’s lead official on that issue, getting high marks from Democratic lawmakers and pro-abortion activists.

So it was no surprise on Thursday that Trump tried to downplay its importance, claiming abortion would be “much less of an issue” during the general election. And he defied reams of polling data when he contended it would be a “very small issue.”

Trump’s appearance, which cable networks carried live after giving similar treatment to recent Harris-Walz rallies, came as handicapping sites such as the Cook Political Report and the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics moved several states’ Electoral College projections to give Harris more votes, although Trump still leads.

So far, the Harris campaign has shown it is willing to throw verbal punches right back at Trump, including about Trump’s light campaign schedule this week — his only rally since last weekend is scheduled for Friday night in Bozeman, Mont.

“Donald Trump is too lazy to fight for anything but himself or leave his country club,” Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer said in a statement. “Fine by us.”

Still, even before Trump was scheduled to depart for Big Sky country, the press conference did accomplish one thing.

“We’re talking about Donald Trump today,” Dent said. “We’re not talking about Kamala Harris or Tim Walz.”

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