And so over the next 106 days, we are going to take our case to the American people and we are going to win.

When Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket last month, she basically inherited a 100 day campaign that is an extremely compressed timeline, especially in American politics. A true sprint to the finish. It's not a lot of time to introduce yourself to voters, but it does seem to be going well for Harris. In fact, a New York Times Siena College poll released over the weekend showed her favorability rating jumped ten points among registered voters in the key swing state of Pennsylvania in just the last month. On the flip side, this moment represents an opportunity for former President Donald Trump to convince voters who weren't thrilled about a Biden Trump matchup to side with him. But that mission seems to be going less well. My guest today is CNN politics reporter Alayna Treene. She covers the Trump campaign. We're going to talk about why the former president has struggled to define his new opponent, and what a pivot back to his once favorite social media platform could tell us about the way forward. From CNN, this is One Thing I'm David Rind.

Alayna, the last time you and I spoke was just two days before the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump. President Joe Biden was still in the race at the time. Obviously, so much has changed since then. So what is the mood inside the Trump campaign right now, and how does it compare to 3 or 4 weeks ago?

The mood is entirely different. And the race is entirely different. I think Biden ending his campaign has really upended the Trump campaign's plans. And part of that is because they had spent the entire election cycle so far on, you know, spending millions of dollars on ads, on modeling, on data, all designed to attack one person. And now they're really struggling to define Kamala Harris and trying to figure out which attacks against her work best. And you've kind of seen that even publicly. I mean, I'm hearing this in my conversations with Donald Trump, senior advisers as well as, you know, in his rally speeches, he's been throwing the kitchen sink of attacks at her, at her new running mate, Tim Walz. And also his entire demeanor has changed a bit as well. And you're kind of seeing that in public, too, whereas, you know, Donald Trump has never been a disciplined messenger or a disciplined candidate.

To say the least.

Exactly. But there is a shift, I think, that is noticeable, at least for someone like me who has covered Donald Trump for several years, who goes to the majority of his rallies. You can see the shift in just how he is even more off message now, I think, than he was before.

So what kind of attacks has he tried out there on the campaign trail?

There's been a number of them. I'm going to break it up like this. I'll tell you what his campaign wants him to do and then what he's doing. So his campaign and people on the outside, Republicans who are allied with Donald Trump, his surrogates, they want him to be talking about policy. And that hasn't changed. That was always the goal with Joe Biden as well. Now, Trump has done some of that in some of his attacks. You can see where he's trying to weave it in. But for the most part, his attacks on Harris have been giving her nicknames.

We're going to evict Crazy Kamala. Do you know, have you ever heard Kamala? Radical left.

Undermining her intelligence? He's lately been mocking her as someone who is not smart.

Since becoming a presidential candidate, she has refused to do a single interview. You know why? Because she's dumb.

He's trying to paint her as more liberal. He's calling her, quote unquote, dangerously liberal, more radically liberal than Joe Biden. But a lot of it is belittling her.

Kamala, sometimes referred to as commonly used to get about nine different ways of pronouncing the name.

And what's been very clear is we're kind of seeing the Donald Trump of 2016, the one whose attacks on Hillary Clinton grew very personal and grew very nasty. It is him reverting in a way back to that old playbook. And we're seeing that play out now, even as many of the people who, are in his ear, who work for his campaign, who want him to get elected, are telling him this is not the type of rhetoric you need to be using.

Right. And we hear things like him talking still about crowd sizes and falsely claiming that pictures of Harris's crowd were AI generated, which is obviously not true. It seems like those kind of fixations just cannot get out of his head.

Yeah, I mean, it's no secret that Donald Trump has long been obsessed with crowd size, but the thing that I think to keep in mind is this is just where Donald Trump's head space is right now. He has been very frustrated with the amount of enthusiasm that she has not only received since Biden ended his campaign and she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, but also that she's been able to sustain it. And part of this as well is that this isn't Donald Trump making up these conspiracies in a vacuum. This is him buying into these far right conspiracies online. And he's, I think, even more susceptible to them right now, given the state of his campaign and him honestly wishing, I think, that he was still going up against someone like Joe Biden, because before Biden ended his campaign, I mean, they essentially were measuring the drapes for office. And now that has completely changed.

Is that why Trump is back on Twitter? Obviously, that was a favorite place of his before he was kicked off the platform. Why is he back there?

There's a couple of reasons. One, it was a bit of a long time coming, I think, you know, especially for people outside of the campaign who are close to Donald Trump, they have been pushing and pressuring him for a long time to get back on X, because Donald Trump views places like X, formerly known as Twitter. Now he has truth Social as a way that he can connect without any sort of in between. Go between and just be very honest with people. He loves to just be able to put out a message and immediately have his base react to it. And that's really what True Social has been. It's kind of been a safer place for him to share a lot of some of these more outlandish ideas or conspiracy theories, but part of the goal now is to it's definitely to reach a different corner of maybe not even the electorate, but the internet. And there's no question that his team believes that he can amplify his message better by being on X, and he can on Truth Social.

All right. Hello, everyone. So, my apologies for the late start. We unfortunately had a massive, distributed denial of service attack against, our servers.

So Monday night, Donald Trump did an interview with Elon Musk. Of course, now, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter. And it was marred a bit by the technical difficulties and the glitches with the Twitter spaces where this conversation was supposed to be held was supposed to start at 8 p.m. eastern, ended up not kicking off until about 40 minutes later, but once it did, they talked for more than two hours. And it was funny. I was actually many people close to the former president. His allies were texting me and they were like, this is exactly what Donald Trump sounds like when he's on the phone with you.

But he totally would've hit if, if, if you hadn't turned your head.. So, like, you know, there was a, it, it was a, a very near thing..

It was a miracle. If I hadn't turned my head. Yeah. I would not be talking to you right now. As much as I like you. Is that thing I would not.

I'd be talking to you from another realm, but yeah.

I mean, granted, it was a very long conversation. It would have been a very long phone conversation. But I think the point of it was that, you know, he felt very comfortable with Musk. It was a casual interview. Musk is not a journalist. So he wasn't, you know, trying to grill Donald Trump on certain things. He also had endorsed the former president weeks before. And that's honestly what I was looking for. I was excited for this interview because I know that this is how Donald Trump operates. When he is in a more comfortable setting, he actually tends to be more candid and to open up. And a lot of times he'll make news in those instances. But he didn't do that Monday night.

And this is where I need an Elon Musk. I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to close up Department of Education, move education back to the states.

Instead, it was two hours of them broing out. They were both heaping praise on each other. Musk many times lobbed softball questions at him, and Donald Trump used it to rattle off many of the campaign. Talking points and attack lines that we have heard have been him make in the past several weeks on the campaign trail. And so we didn't really learn anything new. It was kind of meandering. But it did show, though, that they they are big fans of each other.

You're one of the few people I know that would get excited for a two hour Donald Trump Elon Musk conversation. So that's how I know you do the work.

I mean, it is my job and I don't. I was I was hoping that he would, maybe drop some big news, but unfortunately, it was kind of the same thing I've been hearing time and time again during his, his campaign speeches. So staying tuned for that.

All right, so, Alayna, I've been hearing the last couple of days about this hack of the Trump campaign. Can you explain, like, what's going on here?

Yes, I can. It was a bit weird. So essentially happened is that Politico received a number of documents, as part of a broader Microsoft hack. Now, Microsoft had actually put out a statement in a report, last week saying that they had been, susceptible to some sort of hack, but didn't make clear who it was, who was targeted. But then Politico received documents and it claimed. And then the Trump campaign also weighed in on us, claiming that Iran was behind the attack. Now, we did just get, recent information on this. Some of our reporters, including Sean Lingus, Evan Perez, Kristen Holmes here at CNN, they have learned, that the FBI and other investigators who are looking into this hack and leak, as they're calling it, of Trump campaign documents, that they suspect that the hackers were actually able to compromise the personal email account of longtime Republican and Trump operative Roger Stone and.

Roger Stone that's a name from the past.

Blast from the past, I know. And look, Roger Stone isn't a senior Trump adviser or someone who is, I think has an incredible amount of information as it relates to the Trump campaign because he's not necessarily working in the way that he did before for the campaign, but he's still close to Donald Trump. He is still an ally. And so, it's problematic, of course. And the hackers, according to the reporting that we have had used access to Stone's email to try to break into the account of a senior Trump campaign official as part of this effort to get into the campaign's networks. And so that's where it is now. We know that law enforcement, including the FBI, are looking into this. There are questions about how successful, the hacker was in retrieving this information. And again, the Trump campaign is blaming this on Iran, which is, of course, I mean, a very problematic story just in general. And if they were successful, even more problematic because it's just the timing of this becoming just months, weeks really before the election. And it is a little bit reminiscent of the email hack with Hillary Clinton back in 2016. There is some you know, a lot of people have been arguing that this is the Trump campaign's response to this, saying that anyone who has received these documents and is sharing any of the information from these leaked documents, some of the media outlets like Politico who received them, is just playing into Iran's hands.

That's so different than what we heard.

Exactly.

When he said, Russia, if you're listening.

Put them out there. Yeah. When it was Hillary Clinton who was the one who was on the receiving end of the hack, he thought that it was election interference not to put out the documents. Now, the Trump campaign is saying it is election interference to share some of this information. So we will see where it leads. I think we're continuing to receive more information on this, continuously. But that's where it is right now with where they believe the hack who was targeted in the hacks, which of course I've mentioned is, is Roger Stone.

So then going forward, as the Trump campaign tries to figure out how to paint Harrison and deal with this hack, what are you watching for in terms of how they approach this big stretch where we're going to see the DNC and then it's kind of off to the races to November.

I think they're going to continue what they're trying to do right now, which is figure out which lines of attack against Harris and the Harris campaign more broadly. So that includes Governor Tim Walz are the most effective, and that is going to be a key goal for them. During the Democratic National Convention, you're going to see a lot of counterprogramming, from not just Donald Trump, but you're also going to see his surrogates doing that. And then one thing that we haven't touched on that I actually think is really important is how they're deploying Trump's running mate, JD Vance.

How are you approaching your new opponent, opponent and the new ticket?

Yeah. Well, I think it's pretty straightforward, actually. We're running against a set of policies that I think have failed the American people, and we're running to a set of policies. President Trump's four years in office that I think really succeeded for the American people.

And I think you saw him last week when Harris and had announced that Walsh was going to be her running mate, and then the two of them took off on a midwestern swing of all the the battleground states, they went to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. They also went to Arizona. You saw JD Vance actually go to the exact same states, in many cases the same cities as both of them, to try to draw that contrast. And Vance has really been tasked with making the case when it comes to policy.

I think this election should be about who's going to solve the inflation crisis, who's going to make groceries and housing more affordable, who's going to secure that southern border? Kamala Harris his record is that she's supported all the policies that made that problem worse. Dana...

And I think, you know, after the DNC, in the sprint to November, a lot of this is going to be the campaign as well, trying to you get more information, including. That modeling and data and the millions of dollars I said they had spent working on figuring that out for Biden. They're currently doing that with Harris. But I'd keep in mind that even though the election is November 5th, voting begins in September. So that's part of why this is such a crucial stretch, because many people will be engaging in early voting absentee ballots. And, yeah, it's going to be it's going to be very complicated for them to try and shift gears at this point.

We'll see what happens. Alayna, thanks so much.

Thank you for having me.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.