Donald Trump and his campaign want Joe Biden to stay in the race, according to people familiar with the matter, and have discussed taking steps to ensure they don’t push the president to withdraw amid escalating panic among Democrats following his recent debate performance.
The latest thinking inside Trump’s campaign is for them not to pile on the concern about Biden’s age and mental acuity in case their attack ads push Biden to step aside.
If that happened, the campaign advisers think Trump would lose two lines of attack that have been central to his campaign: claiming that Biden is “sleepy” and lacks the fitness for another term in office, and falsely claiming that Biden is to blame for inflation and an uptick in illegal immigration.
The situation with Biden has flummoxed the Trump campaign as they now walk the tightrope of continuing to campaign against Biden in the likelihood that he remains the Democratic nominee for president, without hitting his age to the extent that it helps push him to withdraw.
Trump’s senior campaign advisers are also concerned that if Biden leaves the race, they would not be able to deploy their contingency plans until a replacement at the top of the ticket was confirmed.
A new opponent could open up new challenges for the Trump campaign. If Democrats coalesced behind a younger candidate, for instance, neither the lethargy portrayal nor the Biden administration record would work – and the campaign would need to come up with newly tailored attacks.
A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
To preserve the status quo – Trump is marginally ahead of Biden in battleground states in private and public polling – the Trump campaign has settled on the message that it is too late for Democrats to change their nominee and Biden cannot step down.
Trump himself has downplayed the idea that Biden would be replaced. “If you listen to the professionals that do this stuff, they say it’s very hard for anybody else to come into the race,” Trump said in an interview with John Reid, a Virginia-based talk radio host.
And the message being blasted by Trump-allied Super Pacs, two weeks after the debate, is that Biden has to stay in the race at least until the Democratic national convention in August if any potential successor wants to acquire Biden’s substantial war chest.
The Biden campaign and the White House have insisted that the president will be the nominee, and are planning a new round of campaign events and interviews. Biden faces an unscripted press-conference at the Nato summit in Washington on Thursday night, and an NBC interview next week Monday.
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Biden’s campaign announced raising $127m in June, ending the month with $240m in cash on hand. Trump raised a comparatively smaller figure of $111.8m, with $285m in the bank.
Still, the Trump campaign has started to plan for contingencies, including if the vice-president, Kamala Harris, became the nominee, although they have been less concerned about a Harris-led ticket because they believe they can hit her with the Biden administration’s policy record, the people said.
The Trump campaign has started to use ads trying to start the narrative that Harris was always planning to depose Biden, using clips of Harris laughing against the Biden-Harris logo collapsing into just the Harris text. The campaign is also accusing Democratic candidates of covering up Biden’s decline.
