“You want to play offense, not defense at Rose Garden. It’s not that we don’t agree with all of their items on Biden’s far-left agenda, but it’s not the time or the place, ”said a Trump fundraiser.
Republican strategist Karl Rove, an informal adviser to Trump, similarly chided the president on Fox News after Trump’s performance on Tuesday.
“Imagine,” he said, “if the president had focused only on Hong Kong and only China and explained what he is doing to confront it. Instead, we had the 64-minute campaign event. Don’t use presidential events as campaign events, try turning campaign events into presidential events. ”
Incumbent presidents have always harnessed the power of the office to their advantage during an election, sometimes skipping more traditional campaign events like parades or shaking hands with local diners rather than introducing politics, giving presidential speeches, and showing mind-blowing greatness. of the presidency with Air Force One and the White House.
While running for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter defined such tactics as a “Rose Garden strategy”, complaining that President Gerald Ford was using the White House to keep him in the spotlight. Four years later, Carter, now president, also remained in the White House with Iran’s hostage crisis hectic and the November election approaching. The tactic did not work for either headline.
Trump does not have many options.
Unable to return completely to the frequent protests of MAGA he loves due to a pandemic, the President has used the events of the White House to campaign against Biden.
Trump started early during the outbreak, occasionally chasing Biden during the near-daily coronavirus task force briefings. At one point, Trump said that under a Biden administration, countries like China, Japan, Mexico and Canada “would own America.”
The president has also done so at quieter events, such as listening sessions. On Tuesday, at a White House roundtable on crime prevention, the president alleged, without evidence, that Biden “and the radical left” want “open borders” for the MS-13 gang.
Then there was Tuesday’s monologue, an hour-long meandering speech that exhorted Biden for any number of things: for the state of the country’s roads and bridges, for a movement to “abolish the suburbs,” for pressing to eliminate windows through climate policies. As is often the case, many of the political attacks were misleading or were done without evidence.
Trump’s allies say the president is simply hitting Biden when he has a platform during the coronavirus.
“Democrats and the media are desperate to silence President Trump,” said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. “They don’t want him to tweet, they don’t want him to stage protests, they don’t want him to speak at Mount Rushmore, and now they don’t want him to hold press conferences. Every week Joe Biden reads speeches from the teleprompter attacking the President and the media cheerfully report every word. President Trump has the right to strike back. ”
And on Wednesday night, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows specifically defended Trump’s Tuesday winder.
“I don’t see anything inappropriate with the comments the president made,” he told reporters. “Those were the policy differences that the president highlighted and … they would normally call that a legitimate debate.”
And Meadows emphasized that Tuesday’s appearance was not a coincidence of Trump.
“It was not planned quickly,” he said. “The event was on the books for several days.”
A person close to the Trump campaign asked if the efforts were something new for the president, who has been mixing politics with his daily duties since inauguration day. But the person encouraged Trump to use the lack of protests to his advantage.
“I think it’s better for him in the short term if he doesn’t have any protests,” the person said. “Use next month to do smaller-scale events that make you appear as presidential as possible in changing states that will dominate the local media.”
However, government ethicists lament the continued erosion of the tenuous firewall between politics and government. The Hatch Act has for decades technically banned government employees, excluding the president, vice president, and some senior officials, from using his position for certain political activities. But Trump’s time in the Oval Office has revealed just how ineffective the law is when it comes to restricting presidential expectations.
“Trump’s failure to comply with the Hatch Act rule in the Rose Garden is consistent with his past actions, giving carte blanche to his employees for violating the Hatch Act,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at the University of Washington. in St. Louis specializing in government ethics.
The law has also not limited Trump’s staff. Under Trump, formal complaints to the government office that oversees compliance with the Hatch Act have skyrocketed. However, no staff member has been punished by law, even when the compliance office recommended taking action. Still, some believe the law could eventually be used.
“The president is obviously abusing White House places like the Rose Garden to replace his political rallies,” said Norm Eisen, a former Obama chief of White House ethics and a member of the Brookings Institution. You are not even hiding it. This kind of blurring violates the spirit of the Hatch Act. It may also expose some of its assistants to legal liability to the extent that they are involved in intentionally violating the law. “