President Biden Orders Campaign to Aggressively Focus on Trump’s Incendiary Comments
In recent days, US President Joe Biden has personally ordered his top campaign advisers to focus more aggressively on former President Donald Trump’s incendiary comments, according to sources familiar with the president’s directive. The goal of Biden’s order is to significantly ramp up the campaign’s efforts to highlight the “crazy” remarks made by Trump in public, sources say.
This directive, previously unreported, demonstrates that Biden himself believes it is essential to portray his potential Republican rival as unhinged and unfit for office. For weeks, his campaign has said it is fully prepared for Trump to be the Republican nominee.
The president’s re-election team has long focused on highlighting the stark contrasts between Biden and Trump when it comes to their temperaments and worldviews. With the belief that warning voters about what another four years under a Trump presidency would look like is critical to Biden’s election strategy, the campaign plans to emphasize this contrast across the board from foreign policy to reproductive rights to protecting democratic institutions.
Biden’s campaign advisers have expressed widespread concern that many voters have forgotten what they see as some of the most outrageous and unacceptable moments of Trump’s presidency. They believe that they must alter this by constantly reminding voters what Trump stands for.
Ammar Moussa, rapid response director for the Biden campaign, stated, “Donald Trump is the polar opposite of everything President Biden stands for and has accomplished since he took office, and the campaign’s top priority over the next nine months will be showing that stark choice to voters.”
Despite his order to his top advisers in recent weeks, Biden issued it before the publication this month of special counsel Robert Hur’s report on his handling of classified documents. The report described the president as an old man with memory problems but did not press charges, setting off a political storm.
Should Biden’s team follow his order to more aggressively highlight Trump’s most provocative statements, the campaign has had ample opportunities to do so in recent weeks. When Trump expressed intentions to encourage Russia to invade countries that do not meet their NATO obligations, the campaign was quick to release a statement from Biden condemning the comments.
On several other occasions, Biden has directly criticized Trump’s remarks, marking some of his harshest criticism of Trump on foreign policy to date. The campaign has also rebuked Trump for his comments about NATO members and for mocking his Republican rival Nikki Haley’s husband, a National Guardsman, for his deployment overseas.
President Biden’s directive for his campaign to intensify efforts to highlight Trump’s incendiary comments reflects the belief that painting a clear contrast between himself and his potential Republican opponent is critical to the election strategy as the campaign looks toward the November elections.