President Trump violated “rule number one” at his “pseudo campaign event” at the Rose Garden on Tuesday when he attacked alleged Democratic candidate Joe Biden instead of holding a press conference, the former chief of staff of the Cabinet said Wednesday. the White House, Karl Rove.
“Rule number one, if you are a practicing president running for reelection, your most powerful presence is as president of the United States,” Rove, a contributor to Fox News, told “America’s Newsroom.”
“You have the largest megaphone, the largest platform, and you have the best ability to control the quality, content, and direction of your message if you act that way. Don’t use presidential events as campaign events, try turning campaign events into presidential events, ”he continued.
Rove made the comments a day after Trump deviated from the script after announcing new legislation against China to attack Biden over his recent political proposals, accusing the former vice president of aligning his campaign with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a representative for New York Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez and other progressive leaders.
“Biden has radically gone left,” Trump said. “There was never a time when two candidates were so different.”
Rove noted that his press conference turned into a “64-minute pseudo-campaign event.”
“The president is stronger when he is president,” said Rove. “That is one of the great ironies about a president running for reelection is that they are always stronger when they focus most of their energy and effort and send messages on the things they do as president.”
“Joe Biden’s entire career has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party,” Trump said Tuesday.
“Joe Biden and President Obama freely allowed China to loot our factories, loot our communities and steal our most precious secrets,” added Trump.
Biden’s campaign then responded to Trump’s comments, saying: “Today’s statement was supposed to be about China, but there was one issue that President Trump could not forget: Joe Biden, whose name the President invoked nearly 30 The whole sad thing says more about Donald Trump than he did on any particular topic.
“The American taxpayer should be reimbursed for the abuse of funds that this show represented,” the campaign said, adding that “a true leader,” referring to Biden, spoke earlier in Wilmington.
Trump’s comments come hours after Biden launched a $ 2 trillion plan to boost clean energy investment and stop all climate-damaging emissions from U.S. power plants by 2035.
Host John Roberts asked Rove: “What are the prospects for the president’s reelection? How does that look now?
In response, Rove provided “an alternative view.”
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“Let’s say those things the president said about Joe Biden are totally appropriate and good points, but what if the president had been focused yesterday on what he was doing as president?” I ask.
Rove said that later this week Trump could have gone “to a manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania, Ohio or Michigan and given a political talk about his predecessors and what they were willing and ready to do.”
He noted that if Trump had “started using his megaphone as president and then continued to be a candidate,” that message would have been “much stronger.”
“If you can keep in mind that you are stronger when you use presidential events to make news and that you need to think about how you can turn the campaign messages you want into presidential events, you will come out of the process stronger,” Rove said.
He then noted that Trump is now behind in the polls.
A new poll on the crucial Pennsylvania general election battleground shows Biden with a double-digit lead over Trump among registered voters.
Rove noted that Trump “may be coming back because I think the speech at Mount Rushmore gave him a bit of a pivot, but he has a long way to go and luckily he has plenty of time to do it.”
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He also said the 2020 elections will be “strange” and “different from what you or I have seen because of how the coronavirus will affect the pace and the forum and function of the campaign.”
Paul Steinhauser and Madeleine Rivera of Fox News contributed to this report.
