Why Trump's team was caught off guard by Biden-Harris switch

• As a result, Trump's team — normally quick to respond to campaign news developments — took two hours to release a statement reacting to Biden's move, though Trump had posted about it on Truth Social about an hour earlier.
• Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller told Axios' Alex Thompson on Thursday that Trump's team was surprised by "the speed in which they got rid of Joe Biden, but there was no surprise that they made the change to Kamala Harris."
• "I personally thought it would be maybe a week later. I thought Joe Biden might try to get through the Bibi meeting," Miller said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington this week.

Zoom in: When Biden bowed out early Sunday afternoon, the team had at least three pieces of anti-Biden material ready to roll out, plus various other messages from the Republican National Committee targeting the president.

• Though some GOP insiders were warning the campaign's leadership that Biden stepping aside was a real possibility, its focus remained on Biden.
• One of Trump's first messages complained that Republicans should be reimbursed for the millions of dollars they'd spent bashing Biden.
• Most of the content created from last week's GOP convention focused on speakers who took aim at Biden.

The intrigue: Before the Trump-Biden debate in which Biden's bad performance led many Democrats to call for his exit from the race, Trump's team debated internally whether Biden would step aside, Axios has learned.

• One top GOP official warned a senior campaign adviser that if the 81-year-old Biden did poorly in the debate, Democrats would push him aside.
• The senior campaign adviser responded by saying they doubted that would happen — and said Democrats were stuck with Biden.

The big picture: The Trump campaign's early response over Biden's move was to cast it as an attempted "coup" by top Democrats.

• In the days that followed, Trump's team jumped on several messages.

• It linked Harris to the Biden administration's border policy, while Trump and his allies got more personal, with attacks focused on her race and gender — the latter a reminder of the tactics Trump used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
• Trump's team, eager to counter the buzz Harris' campaign rollout was generating, also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission challenging the Harris campaign's ability to assume control of $96 million that was in the Biden-Harris campaign's war chest.

What they're saying: "The fact that Harris was largely a non-factor at the Republican convention looks like a missed opportunity in retrospect," Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked on Sen. Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential campaign, told Axios.

• "It's wild that neither Trump nor JD Vance appeared on camera Sunday night," Conant added. "It wasn't until the next afternoon, commenting on it. People make their impressions pretty fast. That was a clear missed opportunity. "
• "Harris was caught flat-footed too," Conant said. "We're in a race to redefine her on both sides."

Trump's campaign disputed the notion that it was caught flat-footed by Biden's exit.

• "We put out a press release. It was ready weeks in advance," Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said.
• "We had discussions before the debate about whether Biden would be the nominee. ... The campaign was already putting opposition research books on Kamala and others a month before the debate."