President Joe Biden on Wednesday gave his clearest sign yet that his reelection strategy will hinge on making this fall’s vote a referendum on Donald Trump.
As he traversed New York City for a series of fundraisers, Biden labeled his predecessor — and likeliest rival this year — an “existential threat” who has wrestled the Republican Party into a stranglehold, intensifying his direct criticisms of the former president and offering one of the starkest windows yet into how he regards the stakes of November’s contest.
“There is one existential threat, it’s Donald Trump,” Biden told Democratic donors in New York, where he was on a three-stop fundraising swing.
“It’s not about me,” Biden said, “it’s about Trump.”
Later in the day, Biden told another group of donors that Trump’s brand of politics was “dangerous.”
“It’s not that I’m so good. But you have to have someone to beat somebody,” he said.
After spending the last year working to promote his own record – and seeing little improvement in his approval ratings – Biden is now increasingly going after Trump, the Republican front-runner, as a threat to democracy, a danger to personal freedoms and, lately, as a Svengali-like leader of the GOP.
He was given a fresh opening this week after congressional Republicans torpedoed a bipartisan immigration bill following Trump’s intervention, a move Biden said exposed toxic election year politics and the GOP’s fealty to its de facto leader.
On Wednesday, he took harsh aim at Republicans lawmakers, using the party’s dysfunction on Capitol Hill to accuse his rivals of blind adherence to the former president.
Biden said Trump “would rather weaponize the issue than actually solve it,” referring to the failed border compromise package.
“Republicans have to decide who they serve,” Biden said. “Are they here to solve problems or just weaponize them?”
He said this week’s collapse of a border deal illustrated the depths to which the GOP has fallen.
“I tell you, I’ve been around,” said Biden, who spent 36 years as a senator. “Never thought I would see something like I’m seeing in the House.”
He said even Republicans who’d previously supported the provisions included in the border bill were “now walking away at the last minute because Donald Trump called them and threatened them with retribution if they stick to their position.”
The remarks, delivered behind closed doors to donors on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, were a preview of how Biden plans to use the failed border vote to his political advantage in the months ahead.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/07/politics/2024-strategy-joe-biden-donald-trump/index.html