ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Donald Trump is seeking Wednesday to recalibrate his presidential comeback bid, this time with a rally and speech in North Carolina that his campaign billed as a significant economic address.
Trump is speaking at Harrah’s Cherokee Center, an auditorium in downtown Asheville, with his podium flanked by more than a dozen American flags and custom backdrops that read: “No tax on Social Security” and “No tax on tips.”
Republicans are looking for Trump to focus more than in the scattershot arguments and attacks he has made on Vice President Kamala Harris since Democrats elevated her as their presidential nominee. Twice in the past week, Trump has fumbled such opportunities, first in an hourlong news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, then in a 2 1/2-hour conversation on the social media platform X with CEO Elon Musk.
The latest attempt comes in the state that delivered Trump his closest statewide margin of victory four years ago and that is once again expected to be a battleground in 2024. The question for the campaign is whether Trump can stick to a tight frame on the economy, especially to saddle Harris with the fallout of inflation, rather than default to his usual stemwinding and grievances.
The speech comes the same day that the Labor Department reported that year-over-year inflation reached its lowest level in more than three years in July, a potential boon for Harris. Harris plans to be in North Carolina on Friday to release more details of her promise to make “building up the middle class … a defining goal of my presidency.”
A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that Americans are more likely to trust Trump over Harris when it comes to handling the economy, but the difference is slight — 45% for Trump and 38% for Harris.
Some voters who came to hear Trump said they were ready to hear him talk specifics on the economy, not because they don’t already trust him but because they want him to expand his appeal against Harris.
“He needs to tell people what he’s going to do, talk about the issues,” said Timothy Vath, a 55-year-old who drove from Greenville, South Carolina. “He did what he said he was going to do” in his initial term. “Talk about how he’d do that again.”
Mona Shope, a 60-year-old from nearby Candler, said Trump, despite his own wealth, “understands working people and wants what’s best for us.” A recent retiree from a public community college, Shope said she has a state pension but has picked up part-time work to mitigate against inflation. “It’s so I can still have vacations and spending money after paying my bills,” she said. “Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing left to save.”
The venue in Asheville is considerably smaller than the typical Trump rally, with fewer than 3,000 seats. But the auditorium configuration, as opposed to a sports arena or open outdoor space that the former president is accustomed to, seemed tailor-made to help Trump as much as possible treat the event as a major policy speech rather than his typical rally.
Trump has been hitting Harris, and Biden before her, on the economy. But he’s done it mostly with hyperbole, such as exhortations of a “Kamala crash … the likes of 1929″ to go with other sweeping generalizations, like warning of “World War III” and U.S. suburbs being “overrun with violent foreign gangs.” Trump made almost verbatim claims about Biden’s potential election in 2020.
Trump has in recent weeks claimed that “you wouldn’t have had inflation” had he been reelected, ignoring the global supply chain interruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19 spending boosts that included a massive aid package Trump signed as president, and the global energy price effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The former president has additionally promised an immediate fix to higher prices in another term. His principal policy proposals on that front are an uptick in drilling for oil (U.S. production has reached its highest levels ever under Biden), new tariffs on foreign imports, an extension of his 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire under the next administration, suspending taxes on income from tips and rolling back Biden-era investments in greener energy and infrastructure.
But at Mar-a-Lago, in his talk with Musk, on his own Truth Social platform and at his most recent rallies and other interviews, Trump has overshadowed his own economic agenda. He’s fixated on personally attacking Harris, falsely accusing her of misrepresenting her own race and ethnicity. He’s slipped back into old attacks on Biden and repeated the lie that his 2020 defeat was due to systemic voter fraud. Most recently, he’s started lashing out over the size and enthusiasm of the crowds Harris is drawing on the campaign trail, even falsely claiming a photo of her rally was fabricated with AI.
Those factors have made it difficult for Trump to render a clearer policy contrast with the Democratic ticket, no matter how much his aides push the idea of such a reframing.
A Harris aide said Wednesday that the vice president welcomes any comparison Trump is able to make.
“No matter what he says, one thing is certain: Trump has no plan, no vision, and no meaningful interest in helping build up the middle class,” communications director Michael Tyler wrote in a campaign memo. Tyler pointed to the economic slowdown of the pandemic and 2017 tax cuts that were tilted to corporations and wealthy individual households, and predicted Trump’s proposals on trade, taxation and reversing Biden-era policies would “send inflation skyrocketing and cost our economy millions of jobs – all to benefit the ultra-wealthy and special interests.”
Announcing his speech, Trump’s campaign listed the effects that inflation has had in North Carolina since Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The campaign did the same thing ahead of Trump’s Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta. Trump even read the statistics from the teleprompter — but did so only near the end of 91 minutes at the podium and long after a few thousand of the once-capacity crowd had left.
North Carolina, meanwhile, is another battleground state where Trump must contend with the newly emboldened Harris campaign in territory that had appeared to be trending toward Republicans with Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Asheville and the surrounding area will prove key to the outcome. Set against the Blue Ridge Mountains, the city has a liberal cultural identity with a Bohemian feel and live music and craft beer scene that attracts left-leaning students, retirees and tourists. But the surrounding western North Carolina mountain counties have grown increasingly Republican in recent election cycles.