Donald Trump’s aides have said they aim to beat Vice President Harris in November by portraying her as a San Francisco liberal who is responsible for illegal border crossings and inflation.

Yet in the past 48 hours, Trump has repeatedly deviated from that messaging to more familiar territory: personal attacks.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” he declared at an event hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists Wednesday. “Is she Indian or is she Black?”

Harris will be “like a play toy” that world leaders will “walk all over,” he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, in a clip that aired Tuesday night. “I don’t want to say as to why. But a lot of people understand it.” And he claimed in a radio interview that Harris, whose husband is Jewish, “doesn’t like Jewish people.”

Trump’s statements are emblematic of the broader challenge the GOP faces: Many of his aides and his Republican allies want to focus on Harris’s record. They have watched Democratic enthusiasm about the vice president’s campaign and believe that some of her personal qualities could help, not hurt her, with independent voters.

But Trump himself keeps changing the subject.

This week, the Trump campaign launched a $12 million ad buy that featured video of Harris dancing, as the narrator declared: “This is America’s border czar and she has failed us,” a reference to President Biden’s decision to ask Harris to lead a multipronged effort to reduce mass migration from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting Trump, ran an ad accusing Harris of covering up “Joe’s obvious mental decline.” Another ad described her as a “dangerous San Francisco liberal.”

“At the end of the day, it’s really about demonstrating through her own words how dangerous, how weak and failed she really is, and it’s not hard to do when you have her doing the talking,” said Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign adviser. “Why tell the American public what she’s for when she does such a good job herself?”

LaCivita added: “With Joe Biden, it was the walking … with Kamala Harris, it’s the talking.”

But despite the ad blitz, Trump’s words, rather than Harris’s, dominated the news this week. Trump’s false accusation that Harris downplayed her Black heritage forced Republicans to respond throughout the day Wednesday. Harris attended Howard University, a prominent historically Black institution and joined a historically Black sorority.

“I was born Black and I’ll die Black and I am proud of it,” she said in 2019. “And I am not going to make any excuses for it for anybody because they don’t understand.”

Even as several Senate Republicans declined to weigh in on Trump’s remarks, he doubled down on them. At his rally in Harrisburg, Pa., a screen showed the headline of a Business Insider story that said: “California’s Kamala Harris becomes first Indian American U.S. senator.”

He also posted a video on his social media site, Truth Social, featuring Harris speaking to Indian American comedian Mindy Kaling, in which Kaling refers to Harris’s Indian heritage. Trump claimed: “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!”

Since Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Trump has also called Harris “dumb as a rock,” questioned her legal credentials and mocked her laugh.

People close to Trump doubt that the personal attacks will be an effective strategy. Alleging the election was stolen, defending Jan. 6 rioters and getting into fights with Harris about race or personality “are not winning issues for us,” one person close to Trump said. Comments that seem derogatory about women also don’t help, and neither does attacking her personally, this person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to criticize the former president’s messaging so far.

Instead, the campaign wants Trump to make data arguments on food prices, gas prices, illegal border crossings and tout his foreign policy record, and not talk about her race or gender, the person added,

Trump has publicly lamented the change at the top of the ticket, calling it a “coup” at a recent event. In private, he’s complained about Harris’s rise in the polls, according to another person familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations. Trump has also been frustrated that Harris has received positive media coverage, while his vice-presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has come under criticism, this person said.

Even though Trump campaign officials and allies publicly maintain that the fundamentals of the contest haven’t changed, some Republicans, including Vance, acknowledge privately that the race has shifted quickly.

Vance told donors during a Saturday fundraiser in Golden Valley, Minn., that the change at the top of the Democratic ticket was a “little bit of a political sucker punch” and that Harris “does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger.”

Since Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Trump and Harris have moved into a virtual tie in a two-way vote choice, with Trump at 47 percent support and Harris at 46 percent, according to a Washington Post polling average.

Harris’s favorability rating increased to 43 percent last week, up from 35 percent the previous week, according to an ABC-Ipsos poll conducted last week. Trump’s favorability rating decreased slightly to 36 percent from 40 percent the previous week.

The Trump campaign’s messaging is “scattershot,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“They weren’t able to brand Biden in 2020 and they haven’t been able to brand Kamala Harris in 2024,” he said. “The arguments that they do make are very ideological in nature, which has never worked for Trump.”

Conant added that Trump does best when he portrays himself as the outsider and said the campaign hasn’t done enough to portray Harris as an establishment pick.

“Instead, they’re saying she’s too progressive which is not an argument that’s proven very effective in modern politics,” he said.

Prominent Republicans in Washington say they have not been given messaging from Trump’s team on how to attack Harris. One top aide to a GOP senator said they were trying to follow the campaign’s lead, but it was difficult to follow sometimes.

One Republican close to the Trump campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, described the campaign ad about the border as a positive development.

“The challenge is to stay on message,” the Republican said.

Scott Clement and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.