WASHINGTON – During a campaign speech this week in the White House rose garden, President Donald Trump lamented that his efforts to make Joe Biden’s son a political vulnerability for the Democrat had failed.
“But Hunter, where’s Hunter?” Trump said, referring to young Biden’s lucrative position on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president. “And you all know about Burisma, but nothing happens. Nobody cares.”
It is one of many Trump coups that have failed to land on his Democratic rival. She called him “Sleepy Joe” and ridiculed him as too tired and unable to do the job. He has been mocked for a constant stream of verbal stumbles. He has painted it as a tool from China. He has linked him to a “police recall” movement that Biden has rejected. None of that is sticking.
As a result, the president and his allies have decided on a different strategy: to paint Biden as an empty container for the socialist radicals to exploit. Trump’s new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said Tuesday: “We will expose Joe Biden as an unfortunate tool on the far left.”
Vice President Mike Pence presented the case Friday during a trip to Wisconsin. “Joe Biden would be nothing more than an automatic pen, a Trojan horse for a radical agenda so radical, so comprehensive that it would transform this country into something completely unrecognizable,” he said.
Trump said Tuesday that “Biden has gone radically left” and suggested that “he would abolish the suburbs.” The next day, he released a conspiracy theory on Twitter about a secret “pact” between Biden and Bernie Sanders, a self-styled Democratic Socialist who was flatly defeated in the primaries, who is “more to the left than even Bernie had in mind “
The new approach comes as Biden’s national leadership has more than doubled to 9 points in the FiveThirtyEight poll average since the US revealed its first death from COVID-19 in late February. The decline in Trump’s political fortune reflects his approval of his handling of a pandemic that has killed more than 138,000 Americans and has paralyzed the economy.
Former Senator Judd Gregg, RN.H., took the narrative one step further by unfoundedly theorizing in an opinion piece for TheHill.com that the Democratic Party’s “socialist / progressive wing” would install a vice presidential candidate and use the 25th Amendment to overthrow Biden in a “coup d’état” months after his election.
“People look down on Joe Biden. People question Joe Biden’s trial. People question Joe Biden’s sharpness at this point. But no one hates Joe Biden, “said Michael Steel, former aide to John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Jeb Bush presidential campaign.” And so, the 2016 playbook the President successfully used against Hillary Clinton just doesn’t work. “
“Secretary Clinton was a singularly unpopular and polarizing figure. Despite the high approval as Secretary of State, the negative image of her had burned in more than decades, “he said. “She didn’t have to be a stalking horse. It motivated the opposition on its own. “
Democrats say Trump’s characterization of Biden as a socialist fails the smell test.
“It’s like saying Coca-Cola is arsenic,” said Ian Sams, a former presidential campaign aide for Kamala Harris last year and Clinton in 2016. “Voters are smarter than that.”
Biden, who cultivated a reputation as an institutionalist in Washington for 44 years as a senator and later vice president, is proving to be an elusive opponent. He is not as loved or hated as Trump. But polls show that he has been seen as more honest and trustworthy than Trump or Clinton. And polls say voters who don’t like both presidential candidates prefer Biden, as opposed to 2016, when Trump finally won them.
“The Trump campaign’s efforts to paint Joe Biden as something he is not are nothing new,” Biden campaign spokesman Bill Russo said in a statement. “The only new development here is the increasingly deranged level of despair they show in trying to sell another ridiculous theory.”
Biden has made some concessions to progressives in an attempt to unite the Democratic Party and avoid defections from the left that hurt Clinton in 2016. He recently requested 100 percent clean electricity by 2035, drawing strong criticism of the Trump campaign. But he has rejected his party’s more liberal ideas, such as a “Medicare for All” system that ends private insurance.
At a March 2 rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, before the pandemic triggered nationwide shutdowns, Trump painted Biden hapless, but more “moderate” than his rivals.
“Honestly, I don’t think he knows what office he’s running for, and it doesn’t matter. You know, maybe he comes in because he’s a little more moderate,” he said. “So maybe he’ll go in, but he won’t run it.”
