When Donald Trump took the stage at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, he felt invincible. Within 17 days this momentum was lost.

During the convention, the Republican Party had rallied around Trump after he survived the assassination attempt. His opponent, President Joe Biden, was coming back in the polls, fundraising for Democrats was falling and intra-party concerns were mounting about whether he could win the election.

And then the 2024 presidential race flipped.

Trump’s campaign went off script and he closed his convention speech with his familiar aggressive rhetoric, undermining calls for unity. Three days later, Biden dropped out of the race. By that Monday afternoon, Democrats had quickly rallied around Vice President Kamala Harris, who had effectively secured the nomination.

The momentum Harris has built with Democrats back in the game has forced Trump’s staff to scramble to find a consistent line of attack against her.

Harris chipped away at Trump’s advantage in polls and fundraising over Biden. The former president’s hopes of narrowing the Democratic advantage among black and Latino voters have been called into question. And how voters will react to Trump’s attacks reminiscent of 2016 is uncertain.

“There’s a shift in the race right now,” Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin told CNN’s “Inside Politics” Friday.

The upheaval of the presidential race brought about by the resignation of the candidacy of Joe Biden strengthened the optimism of the Democrats.

“People need to stop talking about coups,” said a Republican adviser to Trump’s campaign, calling on the party to stop protesting the process by which Democrats switched Biden for Harris. “We won this match and now we have to respond and win another match.”

For months, Trump’s entourage felt like he couldn’t lose.

Trump’s campaign had been designed for the past two years around Joe Biden’s policies.

Trump advisers insisted his campaign was ready for a potential switch long before Biden officially dropped out, pointing to an internal memo from May that laid out scenarios for an open convention and another Democratic nominee.

Trump’s advisers have acknowledged privately that they are still looking for the best way to name his new challenger. Trump himself has tried a series of attacks during his speeches and interviews.

However, he may not have the opportunity to carry out the attacks in person. Harris said she will participate in the Sept. 10 ABC-hosted debate agreed to by Trump and Biden. But the former president is instead pushing for a debate to be hosted by Fox News.

Harris, for her part, pointed out to him his May engagement for an ABC debate. “I will be there on September 10, as agreed. I hope to see him there,” he said on social media on Saturday.

Senior Trump advisers continue to argue that the campaign against Harris will largely focus on the same issues used against Biden: crime, immigration and inflation, arguing that the vice president has played a key role in shaping the administration’s approaches to those issues.

Outside the campaign, however, Trump allies worry that there is no strategy against Harris.

Multiple sources close to Trump told CNN that there were growing calls, both publicly and privately, among him and outside allies to turn the campaign around, citing in part the need to get new faces involved.

Approaching African Americans and Latinos

Trump surprised aides, even some campaign operatives, when he announced he would take the stage at the NABJ conference in Chicago.

Trump’s campaign has long sought to reach out to African-American and Latino voters — hoping that marginal gains in GOP support from groups that have historically voted overwhelmingly Democratic could prove decisive. However, with Harris replacing Biden, it is no longer clear whether such gains are possible.

But for Trump, the NABJ conference was also an opportunity to regain media attention after a week in which Harris had dominated the headlines. But it was a high-risk move that worried some allies.

Trump lashed out at ABC News reporter Rachel Scott over her first question about his racist remarks, including the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The debate escalated from there, with Trump falsely accusing Harris of embracing or denying elements of her heritage for political gain.

“He was always of Indian heritage and only promoted Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a few years ago when she happened to be Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said.

Before his remarks at the NABJ, the Trump campaign had tried to distance itself from racially inflammatory comments about Harris, including those from GOP lawmakers.

The message made several Republicans who spoke to CNN uncomfortable — and many said they hoped it wouldn’t become a permanent part of campaign talk.

Harris avoids Trump’s “bait”.

While Harris didn’t see his comments in real time, she watched news coverage of Trump’s appearance and began to think about how she would respond.

That night, when he addressed a crowd of African-American women gathered for the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority convention, he gave a strong but measured response, dismissing his comments as “the same old show: divisiveness and disrespect.”

“Childless Women with Cats”

By selecting Vance as the Republican vice presidential nominee, Trump had tapped an ideological successor.

But Vance’s positions, many in conservative media, also gave Democrats plenty of material to attack him with. Most notably was a 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson’s former Fox News show, in which Vance, then a Senate candidate, said the United States was run better by “a bunch of childless ladies with cats who are miserable about their lives and the choices they made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable.”

Democrats picked up on that comment — with the Harris campaign and many of her allies using it to call Vance “weird.” And while they remained publicly supportive of Vance, some Republicans on Capitol Hill refused to stand by his statements.

The Trump campaign wants to shift the conversation around Vance, who traveled to the US-Mexico border in Arizona on a visit aimed at shining a spotlight on Biden and Harris’ handling of border security.

But on Thursday in Arizona, Vance found himself defending Trump’s attack on Harris. “Look, all he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon,” the Ohio senator said in an interview with CNN.