The Editor-in-Chief of a conservative news site penned a New York Times column Monday aimed at convincing Donald Trump of the path he should take to secure victory.
And it's the opposite advice to that offered by many other Republicans.
The National Review's Rich Lowry wrote that Trump needed to bombard Kamala Harris with accusations of weakness. And, if he kept on that track, the Democratic Party's momentum will be severely dented.
“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,” Lowry wrote.
“... For as long as Mr. Trump has been in the ascendancy in the GOP, he will go off on some pointless tangent and Republicans will urge him — perhaps as they hustle down a corridor of the U.S. Capitol — to talk about the economy instead of his controversy du jour.”
But, he said, focusing on issues wouldn’t be enough to return Trump to the White House — and he urged the former president to double down on claims that Harris is unsuitable for the presidency.
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“Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character,” he wrote. “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.”
So, he said, Trump should spend the next two-and-a-bit months hammering home his message that Harris is unprepared.
“The Obama team hammered Mitt Romney on the issues in 2012, but pretty much every policy argument went back to the core contention that he was a heartless, out-of-touch capitalist who valued the bottom line more than people. That ended up being the winning argument of the campaign,” he wrote.
“By the same token, 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, a phony, and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class.
“The scattershot Trump attacks on Harris need to be refocused on these character attributes.”
