Trump campaigns on defense as he plans second attention-grabbing press conference

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox

Get our free Inside Washington email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Donald Trump announced Wednesday morning that he would host a press conference this week — his second in seven days, after a previous one said little of substance.

The Republican nominee for president has called to meet the press on Thursday at his Bedminster club in New Jersey, hoping to avoid a slew of negative headlines that followed last week’s, where he repeated previous lies and offered nothing new.

The announcment comes as he was in North Carolina attempting to head off what appears to be a Kamala Harris surge that has put a number of red-leaning swing states back into sudden contention.

Trump, now almost one month out from the GOP convention, once planned to storm through the rest of the summer pummeling ex-opponent Joe Biden all the way, riding on a wave of support buoyed by a shocking assassination attempt and the four-day Trumpfest that was the GOP convention in July.

Instead, he enters mid-August facing a massively shaken-up campaign. Biden is no longer his opponent, having dropped out and endorsed his vice president, while Harris has roundly consolidated the Democratic field and is heading into her own party’s convention with a Democratic Party more unified than it has been at any time through the past two presidential election cycles.

Her selection of Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her running mate has only furthered to fuel her momentum as the affable midwestern politician has fallen into the role of attacking Harris’s opponents, Trump and running mate JD Vance, with ease.

Now, as Trump plots his second attempt to regain a positive national spotlight (or at least transfer some negative attention to Harris). The ex-president rallied on Wednesday in North Carolina, a state where he won in the past two elections but now sees Harris gaining and cutting his polling lead down to single digits.

He also clearly had hoped to recapture some momentum with a flashy interview advertised on Twitter/X with the site’s Trump-endorsing CEO, Elon Musk — but technical difficulties and a lack of focus in the interview led to the appearance being widely panned.

Trumpworld sources were radio silent on Wednesday as the Bedminster presser loomed ahead. Reports from Trump insiders have indicated for days now that the ex-president is privately panicking over the sudden plunge in his polling, or what could more accurately be described as Harris rocketing back into competition.

On CNN on Tuesday, Mar-a-Lago whisperer Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that the reality of running against a Black woman has stymied Trump, who has found himself unable to find an attack that lands effectively.

“She is a woman, and she is a Black woman. And both of those factors have proven very challenging for him in the past,” Haberman opined. “He has seemed to really struggle with women opponents, women critics, and particularly Black women who are critics.”

On Wednesday, Trump’s problems with women voters appeared on the verge of growing even worse. New audio from 2020 obtained by Heartland Signal, a left-leaning news outlet, depicted Vance telling a radio host that the only purpose of women after hitting menopausal age was to provide support for child-rearing.

The ex-president is likely to face questions about this latest audio on Thursday as well as the ongoing campaign by Democrats to characterize his running mate as “weird” and on the extremes of social conservative viewpoints. Trump, in private conversations, has been seen to chafe at the label and defensively claim that Democrats are only leveling it at Vance, not him.