Biden goes quiet as Trump grabs the spotlight
Haisten Willis
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As former President Donald Trump soaks up national headlines, President Joe Biden is in the midst of a five-day stretch with no public events.
Biden last made an appearance on Tuesday to discuss the dangers of artificial intelligence. He held no public events Wednesday and left Thursday for Camp David, where he’ll stay through Easter Sunday.
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The White House, meanwhile, has refused to comment on Trump’s New York indictment, appearing happy to let the former president dominate the discussion.
“Does it bug President Biden when former presidents suck up all the oxygen?” a reporter asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre this week. “[Is it] good to lay low for a couple of news cycles then?”
Jean-Pierre defended the president by pointing to his record and legislative victories, but she has been hounded throughout the week by the press over the administration’s silence regarding Trump’s arrest. Biden laughed and did not answer when asked if the indictment was politically divisive and will spend the rest of Holy Week on vacation.
Conventional wisdom holds that the arrest will help Trump, which polling bears out, at least in the short run. Trump’s advantage over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in the RealClearPolitics average grew from 46%-30% to 51%-25% in less than a week.
That’s good news for Democrats, most of whom see Trump as the easier candidate for Biden to beat in 2024.
As such, Biden is absolutely doing the right thing, argues Florida-based Democratic strategist Sasha Tirador.
“Trump can have the limelight on this issue for as long as he wants,” she said.
While in any other context, a former president and presidential candidate getting indicted would be a huge negative, in Trump’s case, it has given him an unfathomable amount of media attention and rallied Republicans of all stripes to his cause.
Trump himself has made that case, boasting about an $8 million fundraising haul since the indictment.
The White House fiercely denies that it’s leaving the spotlight to Trump on purpose, but doing so is actually the continuation of a strategy the Biden administration has been using since at least the 2022 midterm elections. Biden, whose approval ratings have been stuck in the low 40s since the August 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, worked to put the focus on “MAGA Republicans,” a term hatched for the fall campaign, and away from himself.
The same logic may apply today. Biden’s approval ratings have taken a tumble of late, imperiling his reelection plans just as he’s preparing to launch his bid for a second term.
Tirador predicts the Trump bump will be short lived and that DeSantis will eventually emerge as the Republican candidate.
“This by itself does nothing, but it does begin to chip away at that very small percentage of Republicans left that could be undecided between DeSantis and Trump,” she said. “We’re still waiting on Georgia, we’re waiting on the special council, we’re waiting on several things that I think will tire out that demographic within the Republican Party and convince them that it’s time for a new generation to take over the party.”
If so, that could be a tougher out for Biden, with DeSantis and most of the other challengers being much younger and without Trump’s personal baggage.
They should be wary of the idea that Trump as the GOP nominee will mean a second Biden term, says presidential historian and Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley.
“Democrats said the same thing about Reagan in 1979,” he said. “They prayed for Reagan to be nominated because they thought [former Tennessee Sen.] Howard Baker would be much tougher to beat. Of course, Reagan won.”
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The same thing could be said of Trump in 2016.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Shirley said.