As Trump golfs and woos donors, Biden visits swing states
WASHINGTON — As President Joe Biden visited five cities in a multiday trip last week, former President Donald Trump was hardly seen in public, spending most of his time in south Florida.
Trump has held just a single public campaign event since he locked up the Republican presidential nomination on March 12: a rally in Ohio funded not by his campaign but by backers of a Senate candidate whom he had endorsed. The events page on his campaign website has had nothing listed.
Biden, meanwhile, has been barnstorming the country. After a trip to North Carolina on Tuesday, the Democratic president will have touched down in all of the 2024 swing states in the less than three weeks since his State of the Union address.
The differing approaches reflect the deficits each side is facing.
Trump’s campaign faces a serious money shortfall and mounting legal bills as he fights four criminal indictments. His focus in recent weeks has been on wooing potential donors as his campaign builds its infrastructure across battleground states to catch up to Democrats, who have a significant head start.
For Biden, 81, the tempo is a message in and of itself as he aims to combat persistent voter concerns about his age. Whoever wins in November will be the oldest president to be inaugurated, though polls find that voters see the issue as more pressing for Biden. Trump is 77.
Both sides are projecting confidence and accusing the other of trying to hide its candidate’s problems.
Biden “looks like a lost puppy any time he ventures onto the campaign trail,” said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, who accused Biden’s campaign of limiting his events to “stops at field offices with a few paid staffers who look less enthused than attendees at a funeral.”
Trump, she went on to say, “is greeted by crowds of enthusiastic Americans everywhere he goes, and he will continue to hold massive rallies around the country with tens of thousands of supporters who want to ‘Make America Great Again.’ Joe Biden’s campaign is a failing, boring, disaster. President Trump is building the greatest political movement in history.”
Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa disagreed.
“We are two weeks into the general election and Donald Trump can’t raise money, is hiding at his country club, and is letting convicts and conspiracy theorists take over his campaign,” he said in a statement. “That is not a winning strategy.”
Biden’s team is trying to sell the public on his accomplishments as concerns persist that voters are unaware of what he’s done in office.
“We have not been talking to folks about the issues that President Biden has been delivering on,” said Yolanda Bejarano, the state Democratic chairwoman in Arizona, where Biden campaigned last week. “That’s what we are determined to do.”