OPINION:
Former President Donald Trump has portrayed the great switch in the race against him this year — the Democrats’ late but lightning-quick replacement of President Biden as their presumptive nominee with Vice President Kamala Harris — as another sign of the opposing party’s willingness to manipulate legal processes to defeat him.
“This guy goes and he gets the votes, and now they want to take it away,” Mr. Trump told a rally audience in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, his first since surviving an assassination attempt a week before. “That’s democracy. They talk about democracy. ‘Let’s take it away from him.’”
It may be true, as Mr. Trump asserts, that the unprecedented maneuver amounted to a soft coup within the Democratic Party, effectuated at the expense of the franchise extended to 14 million Biden voters and attended by a bait-and-switch effect felt by donors to the now-dissolved Biden-Harris campaign.
The decision to cry foul about this, to suggest that it reeks of dirty politics, may yield short-term returns for the Trump campaign, at least until the Democratic convention is in the history books, the cycle intensifies still further, and the electorate, reaching the time for choosing, will regard the great switch — its morality and legality — as old news.
However, the episode provides a tough lesson for the former president and those managing his unprecedented campaign: They ultimately allowed the scenario, the entire mechanism by which the great switch was ultimately put into effect, to happen.
The Trump campaign, which has mostly managed the 2024 cycle with extraordinary results — never has any team gotten so far despite so much negative phenomena to contend with — appears to have operated, at a critical moment, from a position of fear that was both inadvisable and unjustified.
What single event fueled the great switch? The June 27 Biden-Trump debate in Atlanta, of course. Would the same audacious maneuver by the Democrats, the replacement of the top half of the ticket, have been possible — or as easily accomplished — if the usual blueprint from the Commission on Presidential Debates, rejected by both campaigns, had been followed and the first debate had occurred, as planned, on Sept. 16 at Texas State University?
Assuming Mr. Biden’s performance in mid-September would have been no less disastrous — few voices are heard today arguing the passage of time would have made Mr. Biden a stronger debater — the great switch, in order for Ms. Harris to be the nominee in time for her to participate in the second presidential debate, scheduled for Oct. 1 at Virginia State University, would have had only two weeks to be accomplished; and the offense to the system, occurring so close to Election Day, would have been more shocking to voters.
That the Democrats were able to schedule the first debate “historically early,” as the sponsoring network, CNN, boasted in its own coverage of the agreement, was possible only because Mr. Trump had earlier boxed himself into a pledge to debate Mr. Biden “anywhere, anytime.”
With talk of a great switch prominent for months ahead of the debate negotiations, Mr. Trump and his advisers were hardly ignorant of the advantages the Democrats could reap from a first televised confrontation taking place in June, a maneuver like the one that was ultimately pulled among them.
So why did the Trump campaign agree to it, when it had every interest in preserving the presence of the weaker candidate at the top of the ticket?
The inescapable conclusion is that the former president and his advisers reckoned they had more to lose from backing down from Mr. Trump’s “anytime, anywhere” pledge — from reversing course and appearing chicken, to use an obscure political science term — than they did from accepting the unwelcome debate schedule and moving ahead with a June date.
Why had Mr. Trump issued an “anywhere, anytime” declaration in the first place? Because the Trump campaign had come to fear that Mr. Biden — taking a page from the former president himself, who declined to debate his GOP primary opponents — might not agree to any debates. Had the incumbent held fast and rejected an offer to debate “anytime, anywhere,” he would have appeared the chicken.
Instead, the Biden campaign — and those within the Democratic Party who wanted to see the 81-year-old incumbent pushed aside — seized on anywhere, anytime and used it to their advantage. Witness the credible polls that now show Ms. Harris running stronger than her boss was.
In short, Mr. Trump colluded in the creation of the conditions that made possible a major change to the favorable dynamics of the race, the great switch, which his campaign never wanted to happen.
What if the former president, taking stock of the polls that never showed him trailing the incumbent, had behaved like a front-runner instead of a nervous underdog, and demanded the two campaigns simply honor the Commission on Presidential Debates and its 40-year role in staging these events?
It would have left Donald Trump the defender of cherished American institutions, and could have sounded like this:
“When I was a candidate against Hillary, we did the Commission on Presidential Debates. When I was president and Biden wanted a shot, we did the Commission on Presidential Debates.”
Why not now — what do they have to hide?
In such a scenario, the game of chicken would have made the loser the last candidate who wasn’t willing to play by the established rules.
Could Mr. Biden, self-anointed defender of democracy, have afforded those optics? His decision in May to call for debates, albeit under terms more favorable to the Democrats, showed he always knew he couldn’t get away with an outright refusal to meet his opponent. Mar-a-Lago just needed to wait him out.
New negotiations are underway for the conditions of what appears to be a single debate between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump.
But the lessons of the episode will enjoy only limited applicability in that arena because the great switch, once difficult to envision actually happening, is, in our age of volatility, already upon us.
• James Rosen is chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and author most recently of “Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.”
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