CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Former President Trump is back on the campaign trail Wednesday - with a stop in the crucial swing state of North Carolina.
But the Republican presidential nominee - in his first rally since President Biden's blockbuster announcement Sunday that he was suspending his re-election bid and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him as the Democratic Party's standard-bearer - is facing a dramatically altered 2024 race.
The president's immediate backing of Harris ignited a surge of endorsements by Democratic governors, senators, House members and other party leaders in supporting Harris and by Monday night the vice president announced that she'd locked up her party's nomination by landing commitments of backing from a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates to next month's Democratic National Convention.
IT'S A MARGIN OF ERROR RACE BETWEEN TRUMP AND HARRIS
But Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley says even though Trump's now facing a new opponent at the top of the Democrats' ticket, the GOP's strategy "does not change…at all."
"We have been running our race, and we are going to continue to run our race," Whatley, a former North Carolina GOP chair whom Trump installed as RNC chair in March after clinching the Republican nomination, emphasized in a Fox News interview.
WHAT'S NEXT FOR HARRIS NOW THAT SHE'S SEEMINGLY LOCKED UP THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION?
Whatley, speaking at the rally site at Charlotte's Bojangles Coliseum, spotlighted that Trump and the RNC will relentlessly tie Harris to Biden's polices on border security, fighting inflation, crime, and other top issues in the 2024 election.
"The Democrats not only have a messenger problem, they have a message problem. And Kamala Harris is doubling down on every single one of Joe Biden's failed policies. It's the Biden-Harris administration, the Biden-Harris campaign. And she is picking up that mantle," he argued.
The RNC chair emphasized that Trump "has absolutely united the Republican Party in a way we haven't had in generations. Now it's time to unite the country around that vision of making America great again."
Trump narrowly won North Carolina in his 2020 election defeat to Biden, and Democrats see an opportunity to flip the state this November.
The trip by Trump to North Carolina - which he narrowly carried in his 2020 re-election defeat to Biden -is the second in two months. The last time Trump was in North Carolina, he was watching NASCAR in Concord over Memorial Day weekend.
The state is one of seven crucial battlegrounds that decided the 2020 contest and is likely to once again heavily influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
"We continue to focus on the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — and the Sun Belt states of North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, where the Vice President’s advantages with young voters, Black voters, and Latino voters will be important to our multiple pathways to 270 electoral votes," a memo from the Harris campaign spotlighted hours before Trump arrived in North Carolina.
Whatley said Trump, in his speech in North Carolina, needs to "continue his conversation with every American family, talking to every single American voter about his vision for a better America. He is going to be the one who is going to restore our southern border, restore our economy, restore our standing in the world, and really be the one around that vision."
But expect Trump to also take aim at Harris, as he's amped up his verbal attacks on the vice president since Sunday in posts on this Truth Social platform.
Among other things, the former president called her "Dumb as a Rock" and "a totally failed and insignificant Vice President."
Harris is also turning up the volume. In a tease of her argument against Trump, Harris is pointing to her law enforcement resume as she spotlights Trump's legal controversies.
"As many of you know, before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was the elected attorney general of California. Before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds," Harris said on Monday in a line she repeated the next day.
"Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type," she emphasized as she pointed to Trump's multiple lawsuits and criminal cases, many of which are ongoing.
