While the current president’s missteps have received ample attention, his campaign thinks Trump’s gaffes have gone largely unnoticed
By Nicole Gaudiano and Rebecca Morin
President Joe Biden’s campaign is aiming to give former President Donald Trump a taste of his own acidic medicine – and neutralize one of their candidate’s biggest weaknesses – by shining the spotlight on their likely 2024 GOP opponent’s verbal slip-ups and gaffes.
A steady stream of video clips on social media in recent weeks from the Biden campaign portray Trump as seeming “confused,” “slurring” his words or marveling over watermark paper that he finds “uhhh amazing,” mirroring a tactic conservatives have used for years to highlight the current president’s verbal and physical stumbles.
While Biden’s missteps have received ample media attention over the course of his presidency – and his poll numbers reflect that a majority of voters fear the 80-year-old would be unfit for a second term – the president’s team argues that the 77-year-old Trump’s gaffes have gone largely unnoticed. And they are working to fill the void and shift the media — and voters’ — attention to the former president.
“Is Donald Trump okay?” the Biden campaign asked in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, earlier this month, with a video mashup of Trump’s blunders. Those include him mistaking the leader of Hungary for Turkey, saying he was in Sioux Falls when he was in Sioux City and calling Biden “Obama.”
The @BidenHQ account, a rapid-response social media page that was launched this fall, found it's latest opportunity to troll Trump over the weekend, when he again appeared to confuse the current president with Obama at a rally in New Hampshire.
Following another Trump rally in Florida last week, the account posted on X: “Trump, slurring: Using the fear tacksicks." And when Trump was praising North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un as the leader of 1.4 billion people, the Biden campaign called Trump “confused,” explaining that North Korea has a population of 26 million.
Other video clips posted on @BidenHQ highlight Trump bragging about his role in helping overturn the constitutional right to an abortion or promoting conspiracy theories. But the blunders they’ve posted are designed to help shift what the campaign sees as a lopsided media narrative.
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“What the Biden campaign is amplifying is simply examples of Donald Trump's erratic and dangerous behavior,” a Biden campaign official told The Messenger. “What we've seen pretty consistently is an imbalance of coverage when it comes to these things… What we’re doing is filling the void for a press corps that doesn’t seem interested in covering both Donald Trump and Joe Biden the same.”
Flipping the script on Biden’s age issue
Polls have consistently shown that Americans consider age and mental acuity to be more of an issue for Biden, even though Trump is only four years younger.
A New York Times/Siena College poll showed most voters (71%) across six battlegrounds think Biden is too old to be president, while only 39% say the same of Trump. A larger share of voters (54%) thought Trump has the “mental sharpness” to be president compared to Biden (35%).
Biden’s aides have grown frustrated over a disparity in media coverage of the two likely major party nominees in 2024. They point to a study by Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog nonprofit, that showed national broadcast and cable networks failed to cover “a series of verbal gaffes and incoherent statements” from Trump.
What the campaign is doing is an important reminder to Americans and the media that Trump says “some very crazy things and that should be taken into account,” said Democratic strategist Rodell Mollineau.
“It's not only that he might go to jail for all of his wrongdoings, but that he might not necessarily be all there,” Mollineau said. “I think that that gets lost in the narrative now, because the narrative is just about, ‘Oh, Trump’s got so many legal problems.”
Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said Trump is a “gaffe machine of incompetence” and that she recently spoke with Biden about his team “punching Trump in the nose about his inability to lead and his incompetence.”
“I do think it's time for them to quit thinking everyone's gonna go, ‘Oh, gosh, Biden's gotten a lot done,’” McCaskill said last week in an interview on MSNBC. “And start focusing on the binary choice between somebody who would be a danger to our democracy and the world and somebody who's going to surround himself with strong, competent people and run a competent government.”
Trump has frequently painted Biden as too incompetent to be president, often mocking the current president by impersonating him, shuffling and confused on how to get off a stage, or mumbling through a speech.
“Look, the guy can’t get off a stage,” Trump said of Biden during a recent rally in Kissimmee, Florida. “He would not be able to figure out — there's about seven staircases that I see. He would not be able to figure it out. He can't put two sentences together and he's in charge of our nuclear negotiations.”
Trump said in an interview earlier this fall that Biden’s age is not the issue, but rather the president’s ineptitude.
“Age is interesting because some people are very sharp, and some people do lose it, but you lose it at 40 and 50, also,” Trump said in a September interview on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show.” “But no, he’s not too old at all. He’s grossly incompetent.”
The Trump campaign pushed back against the Biden campaign's recent strategy highlighting the former president’s gaffes.
In a statement to The Messenger, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said: "The Biden campaign must be confused like their own candidate because Biden is in a constant state of confusion, shuffling around like a Roomba, and falling on his ass in front of the American people because he’s weak and frail. But even more damning is that Biden is just plain stupid. He doesn’t have the intelligence to lead a junior high book club let alone the entire country."
A Biden official said the campaign will continue to focus on reminding voters that Trump is “extreme,” has paved the way for abortion restrictions, and wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. “But we will remind voters just how erratic he is,” the official said.
‘A legitimate concern’ for voters
Some of Trump’s competitors in the Republican primary are also trying to turn attention to his slip-ups as they attempt to cut into his massive lead in the polls.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last month launched a "Trump Accident Tracker," a social media campaign to highlight the former president’s misstatements and missteps on the campaign trail.
DeSantis’ presidential campaign shared a video last week of Trump saying Biden is “in no condition to lead” and that the U.S. will be in “World War ll very quickly” if Biden is reelected.
“Trump also predicted that ‘cognitively impaired’ Joe Biden would involve the United States in ‘World War 2,’” DeSantis’ campaign wrote in the post.
DeSantis, 45, has criticized Trump and Biden for their age, saying that it's “absolutely a legitimate concern" for voters.
Biden himself has been ramping up attacks on Trump as the two appear increasingly destined for a rematch next year.
Pointing to Democrats' big electoral wins last week during a fundraiser in Chicago, Biden said it’s a preview of the 2024 election when the two candidates will likely go “toe-to-toe” again.
"We haven’t stopped winning, and he hasn’t stopped losing,” Biden said. “This guy can't get tired of losing."