Biden’s searing character attacks on Trump may tell a story about his own campaign’s struggles

Joe Biden is throwing everything at Donald Trump.

The president and his campaign are blasting the presumptive Republican nominee as a criminal and a racist who was found liable for sexual assault and who is now being driven so “crazy” by his loss in 2020 that he’s been left “unhinged.”

It’s one of the most searing portrayals in the modern age by an incumbent president of his challenger and is designed to define the 45th president as flagrantly unfit for a return to the office he left in disgrace in 2021. With his two impeachments, a criminal conviction and an attempt to overturn the last election, Trump gave Biden plenty to work with.

But Biden’s strategy may also tell the story of a reelection campaign that is going nowhere near as well as the president must have hoped, as he battles diminished standing across swathes of the electorate and faces a dauntingly narrow path to the 270 electoral voters needed to win in November. New fundraising figures announced by Biden and the Democratic Party on Thursday reveal that Trump and his team outraised the president for the second month in a row, largely erasing what was a financial advantage held by Biden for much of the campaign cycle.

For months, Biden’s team has argued that when the choice between the president and his predecessor became clear to voters, the stakes of the election would shift the political equation in his favor. The theory was that voters were slow to tune into the race and that they may need reminding about the chaos and the discord of Trump’s first term that ended in the worst assault on democracy in generations.

But it’s now midsummer, and the election is less than five months away. There’s every sign the race is still shaping up as much as a referendum on Biden – and a weary populace’s lost sense of economic security – as it is on the threat to the rule of law that Trump is making clear a second term would entail. The president’s campaign is therefore intensifying an effort to highlight the perceived consequences of a new White House mandate for Trump, who has pledged to use presidential power to exact personal retribution, while conservative groups polish blueprints for an overhaul of the bureaucracy, energy, and economic policy.

Biden’s best chance to reset the choice comes in his first debate with Trump on CNN in six days — a confrontation that the Biden campaign is trying to shape with daily attacks on Trump, looking to appeal to demographic groups the president hopes will return him to the White House. Some small shifts toward the president have emerged in some polling since Trump’s criminal conviction in his hush money in New York last month. But the race has been mostly stable with no clear leader for months, which should be troubling to a president who is asking voters to reward him with a new term.

Biden’s best chance for a reset

Thursday’s debate will also represent the president’s opportunity before tens of millions of television viewers to counter the bleak character sketch Trump is conjuring of him. The ex-president portrays his rival as a doddering incompetent who can’t make it to the end of a sentence. This picture is exaggerated. But polls show that most Americans worry about the age and capacity of a president who has noticeably slowed physically in recent years and who would be 86 by the end of a second term. Trump isn’t much younger, and if he wins, he’d be the oldest president, at 78, to begin a second term.

Biden has been road testing his character attacks on Trump for weeks in fundraising events and they’re now increasingly being parroted by campaign officials. At a fundraiser attended by former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in northern Virginia on Tuesday, Biden laid out a stark scenario that included a warning that his rival was waging an all-out assault on the legal system.

“The threat Trump poses would be greater in a second term than it was in his first term. You know … I think he snapped when he lost in 2020. He can’t accept he lost. (It’s) literally driving him crazy. … He’s not only obsessed with losing in 2020, he’s clearly a little bit unhinged right now.”

Biden’s campaign has been seizing the initiative all week as it lays the groundwork for the message it clearly hopes Americans will take away from the debate. On Monday, it debuted a hard-hitting new ad. “This election is between a convicted criminal who is only out for himself,” the narrator says as the former president’s mug shot splashes across the screen. “And a president who is fighting for your family.”

The gambit erased any doubt over how Biden will seek to exploit a guilty verdict against Trump and his three other criminal indictments to which he’s pleaded not guilty. The ex-president’s campaign will respond by claiming Biden’s strategy is proof of an attempt to weaponize the justice system against him. But since Trump’s campaign is already spinning that narrative anyway, Biden may have little to lose.

The ad, part of a $50 million ad buy in June online, on battleground state TV channels and on national cable, references the hush money trial and Trump’s losses in a defamation suit to the writer E. Jean Carroll and a civil fraud trial. Captions laid over dark, monochrome photos of Trump at court read “Convicted — 34 Felonies”; “Liable for Sexual Assault”; “Committed Financial Fraud.” Then, the video flips into full color with a shot of a beaming Biden surrounded by workers while it touts his efforts to cut health care costs and take on corporations. The contrast could not be more striking, and the Biden campaign must hope that it at last begins to take root in voters’ minds.

“The people of America are going to very soon have a choice between Donald Trump, who wakes up every day thinking about himself, thinking about his billionaire friends and then thinks about how he’s going to hurt people that he thinks have hurt him,” Biden’s campaign co-chair Mitch Landrieu said on CNN’s “Inside Politics” on Thursday. “Joe Biden wakes up every day fighting for the American people, making sure that we’re going to protect people’s freedoms, protect democracy and lower costs,” Landrieu told Manu Raju.

Biden seeks to move the goalposts with ads during soccer tournament

The Biden campaign is now making daily pitches to a significant corner of his coalition showing signs of stress. Wednesday, the Juneteenth holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the US, saw a stinging attack on Trump, designed to thwart his attempt to make inroads with Black voters – a vital Democratic voting block.

“After a lifetime of racism and in honor of the holiday, the least Trump could do is give Black America a day off from his campaign’s racist, empty pandering,” Jasmine Harris, the campaign’s director of Black media, said in a statement. “Black voters have had enough – and they’re ready to put an end to Trump’s candidacy.”

The campaign also sent around a list of the many race controversies precipitated by Trump during his lifetime, including his call for the execution of five Black youths over the sexual assault of a woman in Central Park, New York, who were later found to be wrongly convicted, and his long-running racist conspiracy theory about the birthplace of former President Barack Obama.

During the 2020 election, CNN exit polls showed that Trump got around 12% of the votes of Black Americans. But some recent opinion polls suggest he’s currently getting around 20%. That kind of performance in 2024 could squeeze Biden’s margins in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where he needs strong Black turnout in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee to counter Trump’s strong advantage in more rural areas.

On Thursday, the Biden campaign turned to Hispanic voters — another key voting bloc where polls suggest he is underperforming. His campaign laid a seven-figure bet on the Copa América — the international soccer tournament featuring Western hemisphere men’s teams that Lionel Messi and his World Cup-winning Argentina team kicked off in Atlanta on Thursday night.

A new ad featuring the president and slamming Trump will air during games over the next few weeks as Biden’s campaign seeks to remind Latino voters about Trump’s chaotic leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Four years ago, we were shut down. Stadiums were empty. Trump failed us,” a narrator says over images of empty stadiums, arguing that Biden reopened the country and created 15.6 million jobs. The ad then cuts to a shot of Biden in what looks like a sports bar as the soundtrack plays the “Goalllllllllllllll!” cry that South American commentators use when the ball hits the back of the net.

According to an NBC News poll in February, Biden and Trump are tied among Latinos, a constituency that has traditionally voted for Democrats. But Biden won the critical demographic 65% to 32% in 2020, according to exit polls. Unless he can get somewhere near that percentage again, key swing states in the West like Arizona and Nevada could be out of his reach and even competitive states further east that he also won four years ago, like Georgia and Pennsylvania, where there are smaller Hispanic populations, could be at risk.

Biden’s character attacks on Trump represent his best attempt to remind Americans of the fateful nature of the choice they will face in November. Those hits would be remarkable enough if the presumptive GOP nominee were a neophyte candidate who could be easily defined by negative advertising. But most voters already know exactly who Trump is.

So, the finely balanced contest poses a question with which Democrats might prefer not to wrestle: What if enough persuadable voters are fully familiar with Trump’s past and remember the mayhem and division of his White House term – but still aren’t ready to support Biden?

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