Donald Trump: Harris Will Be Easier to Beat Than Joe Biden

Donald Trump. (Wikimedia Commons/Department of State)

JAKARTA - Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump believes Kamala Harris will be easier to defeat, after President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 US presidential race and endorsed the incumbent vice president.

"Harris will be easier to defeat than Joe Biden," Trump told CNN, as quoted by Reuters on July 22.

Trump and his campaign team then also attacked Biden and Harris on social media while saying his rival was unfit to continue serving as president.

On the same platform, Trump said Biden was "unfit to run for President and certainly unfit to serve."

Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, said: "We will suffer greatly from his (Biden's) tenure, but we will soon repair the damage he has done."

Trump and Biden are largely tied in opinion polls, but after the debate several polls showed Trump narrowly ahead of the president in the fight for the November election.

The Trump campaign has begun discussions about how they will reallocate campaign resources for the possibility of Biden withdrawing, 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, the person said, the president’s withdrawal would require a rethink of where to spend advertising dollars and where to allocate resources more generally.

Publicly, Trump campaign advisers and allies have told reporters they are not concerned about facing Harris because they can relate to Biden’s record in office, particularly on immigration and inflation. They have said they will try to portray Harris, and other candidates proposed as Democratic alternatives, as leaning more to Biden’s left on policy.

President Biden decided to withdraw from the November 5 race, opting to focus on his duties until his term ends on January 20, 2025.

He later said he was endorsing his running mate, Kamala Harris, for the 2024 presidential election. Harris thanked him for the endorsement, saying she was ready to defeat Trump and unite the Democratic Party.

In a statement after Biden withdrew, the Trump campaign said Harris was a “big supporter” of Biden. The campaign said Biden and Harris had their own records and “there is no gap between them.” The Republican National Committee's official YouTube channel published a two-minute video Sunday afternoon attacking Harris over her immigration policy, accusing her of ignoring the issue.

In recent weeks, the Trump campaign and some of its allies have launched preemptive political attacks on Harris to try to discredit her amid talk that she could replace Biden as the party’s 2024 presidential nominee.

In March 2021, Biden said Harris would lead efforts with Mexico and Central American countries to address illegal immigration.

Republicans have seized on that to accuse her of failing to stem the flow of millions of migrants crossing illegally into the United States, even though she has never been directly responsible for securing the southern border.