Trump steps up and helps Biden when the president needs it

If anyone gets a thank-you note from President Joe Biden for helping him get out of a jam in recent days, it might be the former president. Donald Trump.

When unwanted questions about his age dogged his predecessor and current contender Biden, he came to the rescue with an ill-timed tirade in which he vowed to “encourage” Russia to attack US allies. NATO Nor do they invest enough in their military forces.

Trump’s unexpected move over the weekend not only diverted attention from the president’s memory problems, as detailed in the special counsel’s report, but gave Biden’s defenders a convenient way to reframe the issue: Yes, you could say the current president might be one. An old man who sometimes forgets things, but his antagonist is also an old man and, moreover, dangerously reckless.

It wasn’t the first time, and probably wouldn’t be the last, that Trump gave a beleaguered enemy an escape route, with one of his characteristic reckless tirades. Trump’s lifelong appetite for attention has often collided with his best interests. For Biden, that could be the key to this year’s campaign: relying on his rival’s inability to remain silent at critical moments and hoping to remind voters why they rejected him in 2020.

“There’s a saying: The enemy of your enemy is your friend,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on the 2016 presidential campaign of Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who lost the party’s nomination that year to Trump. “As Trump is his own worst enemy, he is arguably Biden’s best friend.”

That doesn’t mean age isn’t a political disadvantage for Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest president in US history and will be 86 at the end of his second term. Although Trump, 77, is behind, the special counsel’s description of the president as a “well-intentioned old man with a bad memory” was scandalous and damaging.

ABC News and Ipsos released a poll on Sunday showing that 86 percent of Americans believe Biden is too old to serve a second term as president, while 62 percent believe Trump is too old.

But in Washington, traditional political strategy is to change the subject as quickly as possible when under attack. Biden’s team set out to make the real problem not about his own competence but about the conduct of special counsel Robert Hurr, just as previous leaders like Trump and Bill Clinton have tried to divert attention from the allegations against them to the prosecutors investigating them.

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Days later, White House representatives and aides monopolized the media to attack Hurr, citing the president’s inability to remember key dates, including the year his son Beau died. During the fundraiser, first lady Jill Biden condemned Hurr’s “personal and inaccurate political attacks on Joe” and then asked his supporters for financial donations. The backlash might not convince voters already opposed to Biden, but it gave Democrats something else to talk about.

On Saturday, Trump used the Biden camp’s tactics during a rally in South Carolina to lash out at “rogue” NATO members, saying he would not only defend them if they were attacked by the Russians, but encourage them to follow suit. To “do whatever they want” against those allies.

“Donald Trump can’t help it,” said Rodel Molyneux, a Democratic strategist and partner at ROKK Solutions. “He will always try to draw attention to himself, even if it is not convenient for him. I expect we’ll see many more moments where Trump can’t control his words before this election is over.

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Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations and former South Carolina governor, is still trying to win the Republican nomination from Trump, who remains the favorite, so she used the tilt to bolster her argument that the party should not rely on her. It will lead to victory this fall.

“That’s what we’re all for: random chaos,” Haley said on Fox News. “And it just makes it Joe Biden Seems sensible. While Donald Trump outsmarts Joe Biden, that’s why Donald Trump can’t beat Joe Biden. “They’re taking everything he says and they’re going to use it against him,” he added.

In fact, the Biden camp tried to do just that. The White House issued a statement saying “the murderous regime’s encouragement of aggression by our closest allies is appalling and unbelievable.” In a separate statement released by his campaign, Biden said Trump’s comments were “predictable from a man who promises to govern, from day one, the kind of dictators he admires if he returns to the Oval Office.” On social media, he referred to Trump as a “useful worker” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary under Barack Obama, said the latest episode showed Trump was unable to follow the old political adage: “If your opponent is having a bad day, go away and let him be.” Let it happen. “

For Biden, he said, these unexpected opportunities could prove decisive. “The skill of the president and his team in executing those moments will probably be one of the big factors in determining who wins this campaign.”

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