Trump campaign switches gears to confront a Harris challenge

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will try to show swing voters that his likely new rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, has her fingerprints all over two issues he is counting on for victory in November: immigration and the cost of living.

Sources within the Trump campaign said it will cast Harris, the likely Democratic candidate after President Joe Biden quit the race on Sunday, as the "co-pilot" of administration polices it says are behind both sources of voter discontent.

Biden’s sudden exit and endorsement of Harris has upended the race, just eight days after Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally.

Sources told Reuters that Trump's campaign had for weeks been preparing for Harris should Biden drop out and she win her party's nomination.

"Harris will be easier to beat than Joe Biden would have been," Trump told CNN shortly after Biden's announcement on Sunday.

Trump's campaign has signaled it will tie her as tightly as possible to Biden's immigration policy, which Republicans say is to blame for a sharp increase in the numbers of people crossing the southern border with Mexico illegally.

The second line of attack will revolve around the economy. Public opinion polls consistently show Americans are unhappy with high food and fuel costs as well as interest rates that have made buying a home less affordable.

"She's the co-pilot of the Biden vision," said one Trump adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity during last week’s Republican National Convention, where a unified party anointed Trump as its nominee in the White House race.

"If they want to switch to Biden 2.0 and have 'Cackling' Kamala at the top of the ticket, we're good either way," the adviser said, repeating an insult the campaign has been trying out for weeks focused on how the vice president laughs.

Make America Great Again Inc, a super PAC backing Trump, said on Sunday it was pulling anti-Biden television ads that had been set to run in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania and replacing them with an ad attacking Harris.

The 30-second ad accuses Harris of hiding Biden's infirmity from the public, and it seeks to pin the administration's record solely on her. "Kamala knew Joe couldn't do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead," the narrator says.

Trump, known for using insulting and sometimes offensive language to attack his opponents, gave supporters at a rally in Michigan on Saturday a taste of the insults he is likely to fling at Harris in the coming days.

"I call her laughing Kamala. You ever watch a laugh? She's crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She's crazy. She's nuts," he said.