Trump escalates his attacks on Biden and his family

Some members of the GOP push for impeachment

“Manchurian candidate.” “Stone-cold thief.” “Dumb son of a b----.”

Former president Donald Trump is, by his own admission, attacking President Biden in increasingly vicious terms. The attacks on Biden center on allegations drawn from media reports about the foreign business dealings of Biden’s son Hunter Biden. The president has denied any involvement in his son’s affairs.

Trump’s escalation comes amid his commanding polling position in the Republican primary, setting up what many allies hope will be a rematch with Biden in next year’s election, as well as the former president’s mounting criminal jeopardy, with multiple trials scheduled to occur during the height of the campaign.

The attacks offer a glimpse of potential 2024 battle lines and follow a well-established pattern for Trump of trying to delegitimize his political opponents. During the 2012 election, Trump became the leading promoter of the unfounded conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born outside the United States. In 2016, Trump pledged to prosecute Hillary Clinton and encouraged his supporters’ chants of "Lock her up!"

Now, Trump is explicitly trying the same tack against Biden, announcing in April that he would "retire" the "Crooked" nickname for Clinton and start using it for Biden. "There’s never been anyone in the history of American politics so crooked or dishonest as Joe Biden," he said at the time, during a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H.

The current onslaught from Trump coincides with a broader effort, as House Republicans have supplied a steady drumbeat of disclosures about Hunter Biden, with some pushing Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, toward opening an impeachment inquiry against the president, though they have not specified what it would focus on. Some House Republicans acknowledge the current evidence doesn’t implicate the elder Biden.

"Right now, I’m not convinced that that evidence exists," Representative Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado, said Wednesday on CNN.

Still, polling shows a stark partisan divide in how Americans view the allegations, with the vast majority of Republicans saying they believe the scandal implicates President Biden, while Democrats see things differently.

Trump already tried a similar approach against Biden in 2020. At the first debate, Trump accosted Biden about an alleged $3.5 million transfer to his son from the wife of the former mayor of Moscow. Biden denied the charge as Trump repeatedly interrupted him. The claim arose from a Republican Senate committee staff report, but the money went to a business associate who later testified it was unrelated to Hunter Biden.

In the years since, though, President Biden’s popularity has plunged, and Hunter Biden’s problems have not gone away. A deal for Hunter Biden to plead guilty to two tax-related misdemeanors in Delaware, admit to the facts of a gun violation, and probably avoid jail time unraveled in July, leading to the appointment of a special counsel and the possibility that the case could go to trial during the campaign.

"For five years now, Republicans have been chasing and failing to prove their own conspiracies about Hunter Biden and his legitimate business activities," his lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a statement. "Unlike Donald Trump and his family, Hunter Biden was not in business with his father, he did not work in his administration or create billiondollar investments based on any work during public service."

In an August Yahoo/YouGov poll, 86 percent of Republicans said Hunter Biden got preferential treatment, compared with 22 percent of Democrats. Eightyfour percent of Republicans also said they believed Hunter Biden "funneled millions of dollars to his father in a long-running scheme to help Joe Biden profit off of his position," a claim that only 10 percent of Democrats accepted.