Despite a hotly anticipated House Democratic Caucus meeting that went nowhere and a meeting between Senate Democrats that was described as “a constructive conversation” (that also went nowhere), everything in Democratic presidential politics remains the same: Joe Biden is still the Democratic nominee. Still, no matter how many Dems insist that nothing has changed, the past 10 days have showcased a different campaign style from the president, as he fights to hang on as a candidate.
Biden emerged for his Friday interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos eager to strike a new pose after his disastrous debate performance eight days prior. After a week of doing almost nothing to assuage nervous Democrats that he was indeed up to the task of beating Donald Trump, Biden sat across from the longtime TV personality and evinced a new aggressive tack. What he said, though, was less striking than his appearance: Few viewers would say he looked up to the task of beating Trump, but he definitely did look a lot more like Trump himself, lacquered in the orange patina that has been the former president’s signature.
But Biden’s being in bronzer is not the only Trumpy aesthetic turn the president has taken since late June’s debate disaster, which revealed his condition to be much more dire than was previously understood. He’s now running a truly embattled presidential campaign that has him trailing Trump nationally and in most if not all swing states, sitting atop the worst approval rating ever for this point in a first term, and trending worse. In response, Biden has seized upon this low moment with a strategy that seems to owe a lot to his predecessor.
First, Biden has closed ranks around himself, relying less on his paid and professional advisers and more on his family members for input. In recent days, reports have noted that the decision to forge ahead in the presidential race will come down to his wife, Jill Biden. His granddaughters Finnegan and Natalie Biden have appeared on the fundraising trail with him, and Valerie Owens, his sister, has turned up in Washington.
But the biggest shift has been the increased involvement of Hunter Biden, who has taken on a newly expanded role within the Biden campaign world and has clashed with the president’s advisers. The placement of entirely unqualified, large adult male sons into powerful positions deep in the inner sanctum was a core feature of the Trump campaign and governance experience just four years ago. It’s not as if Biden is sending his son-in-law to, say, solve the “decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” But it’s unnerving to see Hunter, who has plenty of personal reasons to persuade his father to stay in power, anywhere near political decisions.
The comparisons don’t stop there. On Monday, Biden began raging against “elites” in the Democratic Party, whom he now blames for his embattled campaign status. “I’m getting so frustrated by the elites—now, I’m not talking about you guys—the elites in the party, ‘Oh, they know so much more.’ Any of these guys that don’t think I should run, run against me,” he told Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. His complaint seems aimed not at potential competitors but at pundits (particularly in the New York Times editorial pages) and Democratic donors. A number of them have announced since the debate that they would pause donations to the Biden campaign, while some told the press they felt they had been misled by the clear decline in the president’s condition.
Harping on party elites too has been a cornerstone of the Trump messaging strategy since 2016. Trump had a strong case: Republican Party elites did strongly oppose the former president’s campaign, in multiple cycles; many of them went to great lengths to boost his opponents or get him out, and have done so again in 2024. Biden, meanwhile, has a weaker case. He has been the overwhelming beneficiary of a party apparatus that worked hard behind the scenes to shield him from public appearances (he hasn’t taken questions from voters at a town hall–style event since 2021), to cancel primary races in certain states, and to keep the big-business political organization No Labels from mounting a real third-party candidate, all while Biden has remained available to large donors.
His appearance on Morning Joe, a program he reportedly watches religiously, came off like a classic Trump appearance on his own morning cable show of choice, Fox & Friends. Trump would often call in and bloviate live, never going on camera. Biden too appeared as an angry voice over the sound of shuffling papers, behind a headshot.
And his Morning Joe appearance also featured an approach to health care that evoked the former president. When asked if he had been tested for any age-related health issues that might contextualize what was seen at the debate, Biden said, “I’ve been testing myself.” His appearance on ABC News Friday featured a similar flourish, as Biden told Stephanopoulos “all the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up,” when asked about the mounting number of polls that show Biden well behind.
It wouldn’t be Trump-style without a shot at the press, and Biden has trained his fury on the Fourth Estate as well. As Semafor noted in a recent piece, “The Biden team remains fixated on its longest-running adversary. Not Donald Trump—The New York Times.”
Biden, of course, isn’t Trump. The records of the two men as presidents and private citizens are starkly different; they are running as opposites on everything from a woman’s right to choose to tax rates on the very wealthy. Only one of the candidates is a convicted felon who also was twice found liable for sexual assault, and attempted to overturn the 2020 election in an effort that culminated in a violent attack on the Capitol, leaving several people dead.
But Biden’s pivot, in this moment of crisis, from an active attempt to refocus the campaign on Democratic policies or to actively bring the party together on a positive message, feels notable all the same. The wandering away from assurance toward coercion, a shift that Semafor has called a pledge of “mutually assured destruction,” has Democrats feeling more despondent than ever. “The question of how to move forward has been well-aired for over a week now. And it’s time for it to end,” Biden warned in a Monday letter to House Democrats.
The Trumpian strategy did work for Trump once. But it also failed once, when it came up against a guy pledging to be its opposite. That guy was Joe Biden.
This article was originally published by a slate.com . Read the Original article here. .