For months, President Biden seemed to take pleasure in bullying Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies, each time trying to make MAGA and ultra-MAGA shorthand for the entire party.
This week, Mr. Biden was brutal flagged a video in which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia mockingly crosses out his first term performance and compares him – not positively – to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “I approve this message,” the president responded to the video, which has been viewed more than 43 million times in 24 hours.
Mr. Biden recently rode a victory lap when Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama promoted local spending in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which Mr. Tuberville had voted against.
And his campaign fired at Mr. Trump for not visiting Wisconsin during his current presidential bid, accusing him of “failing to deliver on his promised US manufacturing boom.”
But when it comes to the topic dominating the presidential race this week, Mr. Biden and his closest allies are treating Mr. Trump’s legal troubles like Voldemort — at all costs any mention of the charges that should not be mentioned.
This moment comes after weeks of polls, both public and private, suggesting that Mr. Trump, who is comfortably the frontrunner in the Republican primary, would be a weaker opponent in next year’s general election than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or other GOP candidates.
The White House and the Biden campaign have not sent explicit instructions to surrogates and supporters telling them to avoid Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, but many on Team Biden have gotten the message loud and clear: Don’t talk about the charges against Trump.
“The American people want the judicial process to proceed without interference from politicians,” said Representative Ro Khanna of California, a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “President Biden monitors the feelings of the American public by talking about what matters to them.”
Mr Biden has said he will not comment on investigations and charges against Mr Trump – a reflection of his clear desire not to be seen as an invasion of the Justice Department’s independence, as well as the political imperative to dismiss Republicans’ brutal, evidence-free accusations that he is the hidden hand behind the prosecutions.
The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee have repeatedly declined to comment or answer questions about Trump’s charges. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has dodged numerous questions about Mr Trump’s legal travails in recent weeks.
“I’m just not going to respond to the hypotheses that currently, you know, exist in the world,” Mrs. Jean-Pierre said Tuesday after Mr. Trump revealed he had received a so-called target letter from federal investigators, a sign that he could soon be charged in the investigation of the events culminating in the U.S. Capitol riot. “I’m just not going to comment from here.”
The Biden world’s approach to Mr Trump’s charges mirrors how the Democrats treated Mr Trump, then the president, during the 2018 midterm elections.
Dozens of resistance-fuelled Democrats ran for and won seats in the House by focusing on health care policy without putting Mr. Trump at the center of their campaigns. They didn’t need to talk about Trump then, it was thought, because the voters had already made up their mind about him.
“He’s ubiquitous, and the voters motivated to vote against him and his party already know what they need to know,” said Meredith Kelly, a strategist who worked for the House Democrats’ campaign division in 2018. “It allowed congressional candidates to talk about real kitchen table issues that affect families and that continues to be the case this cycle as it looms large over the battlefield in 2024.”
There is also no question that polls show Mr. Biden stronger against Mr. Trump than Mr. DeSantis or others, giving the president little incentive to do anything to damage Mr. Trump’s standing among the Republican primary voters.
A poll in Michigan conducted last week by a Republican-leaning poll found Mr. Biden to be one percentage point ahead of Mr. Trump, but two percent below Mr. DeSantis. The same company’s poll in Nevada found Mr. Biden to be four points ahead of Mr. Trump and two behind Mr. DeSantis. And in Wisconsin last month, a Marquette University Law School poll showed Mr. Biden had a nine-point lead over Mr. Trump, but a two-point lead over Mr. DeSantis.
According to Charles Franklin, Marquette’s pollster, both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have support from hard-core Republicans in a game against Mr. Biden, but among Republican-leaning independents, Mr. Trump’s support is waning, while Mr. DeSantis’s is not.
The public poll is consistent with the White House’s own poll of states on the battlefield.
One who is only too happy to add to discussions about the investigations and indictments is Mr. Trump himself. Of course, it was the former president who revealed that he had received the target letter.
“Crooked Joe Biden has armed the Justice Department to go after his main political opponent, President Trump, who is the overwhelming frontrunner to take back the White House,” said Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesman. “Biden wants to interfere in the election because he knows he doesn’t stand a chance against President Trump.”
Ms. Greene’s Biden campaign video served to tweak and elevate one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest far-right supporters and promote Mr. Biden’s own record without getting into the lawsuits against Mr. Trump. Polls conducted last year outside the White House showed that Ms. Greene was known and disliked by a large segment of voters and that independent voters associated her with Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.
Mr Biden’s campaign on Wednesday called her an “unintentional campaign” spokeswoman.
“Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that actually finishes what FDR started, which LBJ has expanded and Joe Biden is trying to complete,” Ms. Greene said at the Turning Point Action conference over the weekend, in the video clipped by the Biden campaign.
The result is a sharp 35 second videospread on Mr Biden’s Twitter feed with the introduction: “I approve this post.”
The clip was similar to the moment last month when Mr. Biden highlighted unusual and unexpected support from another Trump-focused Republican, Sen. Tuberville, who praised Alabama spending on the infrastructure bill, which Mr. Biden signed into law and which the senator had voted against.