CNN
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Joe Biden is going all out against Donald Trump.
The president and his campaign have slammed the Republican front-runner as a criminal, a racist and a sexual assault suspect, and said he has “gone mad” and is mentally ill after losing the 2020 election.
It was one of the most scathing portrayals of a challenger by a sitting president in modern times, aimed at defining the 45th president, who left office in disgrace, as patently unfit to return to office in 2021. With two impeachments, a criminal conviction and an attempt to overturn the results of the last election, Trump has given Biden plenty of ammunition.
But Biden’s strategy may signal that his reelection campaign is not going as well as the president had hoped. Biden is battling widespread sagging support among voters and faces an incredibly narrow path to winning the 270 electoral votes needed to win the November election. New fundraising figures released by Biden and the Democratic Party on Thursday revealed that Trump and his team have outraised the president for a second straight month, all but erasing the financial advantage Biden held for much of the election.
Mr. Biden’s team has argued for months that the stakes of the election would tilt in his favor once voters knew they had to choose between the president and his predecessor. The theory was that voters might be slow to pay attention to the race and need to be reminded of the chaos and discord of Mr. Trump’s first term, which marked the worst assault on democracy in generations.
But it’s midsummer, and the election is less than five months away. There are signs that the race is still shaping up as much as the referendum on Biden and the lost economic security of an exhausted nation and Trump making clear that a second term would entail threats to the rule of law. So the presidential campaign is stepping up efforts to highlight the likely impact of a new White House mandate on Trump, who has vowed to use presidential power to exact personal revenge. Meanwhile, conservative groups are honing blueprints for sweeping reforms of the bureaucracy, energy and economic policy.
Biden’s biggest chance to reset the choice is his first debate with Trump in six days on CNN. Biden’s campaign is framing the showdown with daily attacks on Trump, appealing to voters who hope he will return to the White House. Some polls have seen a slight uptick in the president’s support since his conviction in New York last month on hush-money charges. But the race has remained largely stable in recent months with no clear leader, worrying for a president who is asking voters to reward him with another term in office.
Thursday’s debate is also a chance to push back against Trump’s dark portrayal of the president. The former president has painted his rival as a shaky, incompetent man who can’t finish a sentence — a portrayal that’s exaggerated. But polls show most Americans worry about the age and abilities of a president who has significantly declined physically in recent years and will be 86 by the end of his second term. Trump isn’t getting any younger either — at 78, if he wins, he’ll be the oldest president to serve a second term.
Biden has been testing character attacks on Trump at fundraisers for weeks, but now campaign officials are repeating them with increasing frequency. At a fundraiser in northern Virginia on Tuesday that was also attended by former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Biden laid out a stark scenario that included warning that his rival was launching an all-out attack on the justice system.
“The threat that Trump poses is going to be greater in a second term than he was in his first. I think he lost in 2020 and lost his temper. He can’t accept that he lost. He’s literally going crazy. Not only is he obsessed with losing in 2020, he’s clearly lost a little bit of his mind right now.”
The Biden campaign has been in control all week, clearly laying the groundwork for the messaging it hopes Americans will take from the debates. On Monday, it debuted a hard-hitting new ad: “This election is between a convicted felon who’s only looking out for himself and a president who’s fighting for your family,” a narrator says as a photo of the former president flashes on screen.
The maneuver erased any questions about how Biden might try to use Trump’s guilty verdict and the three other criminal charges he has pleaded not guilty to. The former president’s campaign will likely fight back, arguing that Biden’s strategy is evidence of an attempt to weaponize the justice system against him. But with the Trump campaign already crafting its story, Biden may have little to lose.
The ad, part of a $50 million ad buy in June across online, battleground TV stations and national cable, references Trump’s losses in the hush money trial, the defamation suit against author E. Jean Carroll and his civil fraud trial. A dark, black-and-white photo of Trump in court is captioned with “Convicted — 34 Felony Counts,” “Guilty of Sexual Assault,” and “Committed Financial Fraud.” The video then switches to full color with a shot of a smiling Biden surrounded by workers touting his efforts to cut health care costs and take on corporations. The contrast couldn’t be more striking, and the Biden campaign must be hoping this finally starts to take hold in voters’ minds.
“The American people are going to have to choose very soon between Donald Trump and a Trump who wakes up every day thinking about himself and his billionaire friends and how he’s going to hurt those he thinks have hurt him,” Biden campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu said Thursday on CNN’s “Inside Politics.” “Joe Biden is going to wake up every day for the American people and make sure we protect their freedoms and our democracy and bring down the costs,” Landrieu told Manu Raju.
Biden’s campaign is now making daily appeals to a key corner of his coalition that is showing signs of stress. On Wednesday, the Juneteenth holiday marking the end of slavery in the United States, there were scathing attacks aimed at thwarting Trump’s efforts to make inroads with black voters, a key Democratic voting bloc.
“After a lifetime of racism, the least Mr. Trump can do in honor of the holiday is give black Americans a day of respite from his campaign’s racist and empty pandering,” Jasmine Harris, the campaign’s black media director, said in a statement. “Black voters have had enough. They are ready to put an end to Mr. Trump’s candidacy.”
The campaign also circulated a list of the many racial controversies Trump has stirred up during his life, including his call for the execution of five black men for sexually assaulting women in New York’s Central Park that were later found to be falsely accused, and his long-running racist conspiracy theory about the birthplace of former President Barack Obama.
In the 2020 election, Trump won about 12% of the black American vote, according to CNN exit polls. However, recent polls suggest he now has about 20%. Such a performance in 2024 could narrow Biden’s vote margin in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Biden will need to boost black voter turnout in cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee to counter Trump’s strong lead in more rural areas.
On Thursday, the Biden campaign turned its attention to Hispanic voters, another key voting demographic where polls suggest Biden’s support is languishing. The Biden campaign made a seven-figure bet on the Copa America, an international soccer tournament for the Western Hemisphere’s men’s teams, which began Thursday night in Atlanta with Lionel Messi’s World Cup-winning Argentina squad.
The Biden campaign is trying to remind Latino voters of Trump’s disorganized leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, with new ads featuring the president criticizing Trump airing during games in the coming weeks. “Four years ago, we were shut down. The stadiums were empty. Trump let us down,” a narrator says over footage of empty stadiums, claiming that Biden has reopened the country and created 15.6 million jobs. The ad then cuts to a shot of Biden in what appears to be a sports bar, with the soundtrack featuring the South American commentator chant “GOALAAAAAAAAA!” when the ball hits the back of the net.
An NBC News poll in February found Biden and Trump tied among Hispanic voters, who traditionally vote Democratic. But exit polls showed Biden won this key demographic 65% to 32% in 2020. Unless Biden can get close to that percentage again, key Western battleground states like Arizona and Nevada could be out of reach, and even eastern battleground states he won four years ago, such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, which have small Hispanic populations, could be at risk.
Biden’s character attacks on Trump are his biggest attempt yet to remind Americans of the fateful nature of the choice they will face in November. Such attacks would be noteworthy enough if the Republican nominee was a freshman candidate easily defined by negative advertising. But most voters already know exactly who Trump is.
So this delicate contest raises a question Democrats may not want to address: What if a large enough share of persuadable voters know Trump’s history well enough, remember the turmoil and division of his time in the White House, but still aren’t ready to support Biden?
