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 10 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 Elaina Treen. 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 Reind. Elaina, 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. What is the mood inside the Trump campaign right now, and how does it compare to three, four 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 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 seen that even publicly. I mean, I'm hearing this in my conversations with Donald Trump's senior advisors, as well as in his rally speeches. He's been throwing the kitchen sink of attacks at her new running mate, Tim Walls. Also, his entire demeanor has changed a bit as well, and you're seeing that in public, too. Whereas, 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.

What a text 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. 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 if you heard of 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 Kamala. She got about nine different ways of pronouncing the name. What's been very clear is we're 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. 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. 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 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, too, I think to keep in mind is this is just where Donald Trump's headspace 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, they essentially were measuring the drapes for office, and now that has completely changed.

Is that why Trump is back on Twitter/X? 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, 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 True Social, as a way that he can connect without any 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. That's really what True Social has been. It's 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 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 than 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. It was supposed to start at 08:00 PM Eastern, ended up not kicking off until about 40 minutes later. But once it did, they talked for more than 2 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 have hit if you hadn't turned your head. So it was a very near thing. It was a miracle. If I hadn't turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now as much as I like you. I think.

I would not be talking.

He'd be talking to me from another realm. Yeah, that's right. 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 he felt very comfortable with Musk. It was a casual interview. Musk is not a journalist, so he wasn't 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 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. 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 broeing out. They were both heoping praise on each other. Musk many times lobed 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 him make in the past several weeks on the campaign trail.

And so we didn't really learn anything new. It was meandering, but it did show, though, that 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 know. I was hoping that he It would maybe drop some big news, but unfortunately, it was the same thing I've been hearing time and time again during his campaign speeches. So staying tuned for that.

Wait. So, Elaina, I've been hearing the last couple of days about this hack of the Trump campaign. Can you explain what's Is there something going on here?

Yes, I can. It was a bit weird. What 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 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 this, claiming that Iran was behind the attack. Now, we did just get recent information on this. Some of our reporters, including Sean Lingsis, Evan Perez, Kristenristen 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. Roger Stone.

That's a name from the past.

Blast from the past, I know. Look, Roger Stone isn't a senior Trump advisor or someone who, 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. It's problematic, of course. 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. 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. Again, the Trump campaign is blaming this on Iran, which is, of course, a very problematic story just in general. If they were successful, even more problematic because it's just the timing of this becoming just months, weeks, really, before the election. It is a little bit reminiscent of the email hack with Hillary Clinton back in 2016. 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 last time around when he said Russia, if you're listening.

Exactly. Put them out there. Yeah, when it was Hillary Clinton, who was the 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. 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 hack, which, of course, I've mentioned is Roger Stone.

Then going forward, as the Trump campaign tries to figure out how to paint Harris 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 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 Walls, are the most effective. That is going to be a key goal for them during the Democratic Democratic National Convention, you're going to see a lot of counter programming from not just Donald Trump, but you're also going to see his surrogates doing that. 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 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. You saw him last week when Harris had announced that Walsh was going to be her running maid, and then the two of them took off on a Midwest swing of all 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. 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's record is that she supported all the policies that made that problem. We're Stana.

We're trying to say we're going to take the country in a different direction.

I I think after the D&C in this sprint to November, a lot of this is going to be the campaign as well, trying to 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. Yes. But I'd keep in mind that even though the election is November fifth, voting begins in September. 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 very complicated for them to try and shift gears at this point.

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

Thank you for having me.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paula Ortiz and me, David Reind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Fez Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dizula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, Jamis Andres, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarau. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.