WASHINGTON: As US President Joe Biden on Sunday ended his reelection campaign in a letter posted on social media platform X, former president Donald Trump campaign team lashed at Kamala Harris, saying she would be “even worse” than the outgoing leader.

“Harris will be even worse for the people of our nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two,” the campaign said in a statement.

On his Truth Social platform on Sunday, Trump said Biden “was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve.” Other top Republicans, including House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, also said Biden was not fit to serve as president and finish his term if he was stepping aside as the Democratic presidential candidate. Johnson explicitly called on Biden to resign.

Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, said: “We will suffer greatly because of his (Biden’s) presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly.”

Trump campaign team calls Harris ‘even worse’ than the outgoing leader

Trump and Biden had been mostly tied in polls, but after the debate some polls showed Trump narrowly ahead of the president in a match-up for the November elections.

The Trump campaign had already begun discussions about how it would redeploy campaign resources for the possibility of Biden’s dropping out, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Sunday.

Given that any alternative Democratic candidate would likely have different strengths and weaknesses than Biden, that person said, the president’s dropping out would require rethinking where to spend ad dollars and where to deploy resources more generally.

Publicly, Trump campaign advisers and allies have been telling reporters they are not worried about facing Harris because they can simply tie her to Biden’s record in office, particularly on immigration and inflation. They say they will try to portray Harris, and any of the other candidates being suggested as alternatives for the Democrats, as being to the left of Biden on various policies.

Just minutes after Biden announced his exit from the 2024 race, Trump in a phone call with CNN said, “He is the worst president in the history of our country. He goes down as the single worst president by far in the history of our country.”

However, Trump also said he thought Harris would be easier to defeat than Biden would have been, according to CNN.

‘I took a bullet for democracy’

Earlier holding his first campaign rally on Saturday since surviving an assassination attempt, Trump rejected concerns that he is a threat to democracy, triumphantly telling a cheering crowd: “Last week I took a bullet for democracy.”

“I’m not an extremist at all,” the Republican continued at the rally in swing state Michigan, dismissing his reported links to Project 2025, a shadow manifesto from figures close to him that has been characterised by opponents as an authoritarian, right-wing wish list.

And he mocked the rival Democratic Party, roiled by unprecedented pressure for President Joe Biden to abandon his reelection bid amid concerns over his age and fitness to serve, if reelected, until 2029. “They have no idea who their candidate is... This guy goes and he gets the votes, and now they want to take it away. That’s democracy,” Trump told the 12,000-strong crowd of passionate supporters.

Published in Dawn, July 22nd, 2024