As Trump begins ’24 bid, White House forms plan
Biden team aiming to show ex-president accomplished little
WASHINGTON — With Donald Trump’s announcement that he is officially running to reclaim the Oval Office he falsely asserts was stolen from him, President Joe Biden is ready to implement what some of his top aides refer to as the “Trump project.”
Biden has spent much of the last year putting a fearsome face on the “ultra-MAGA” agenda, taking aim at Republican senators, governors and state lawmakers. Now, he will return the focus to his once and future foil — Trump.
Inside the West Wing, a small group of presidential advisers has been working to develop a plan for how Biden and the White House will respond to what they expect will be a constant stream of invective from the former president now that he is formally a candidate.
Trump started the attacks almost immediately in his speech Tuesday night announcing his presidential run, as he complained about “Biden and the radical-left lunatics running our government right into the ground.”
Biden will continue to underscore his belief that Trump is a threat to democracy, advisers say. But his political handlers are determined to show that Trump’s four years did not yield actual accomplishments for the American people.
On Tuesday, hours before Trump’s announcement, Biden’s political Twitter account posted a video mocking the former president’s claims that he was doing something about the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. The video, titled “The difference between talking and delivering,” showed Biden signing his $1 trillion infrastructure measure into law, juxtaposed with a compilation of clips of the former president using the word “infrastructure.”
During Trump’s speech, the Twitter account posted another video, titled “Donald Trump failed America,” showing scenes of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot.
The effort to coordinate the response has involved months of research and is being led by Anita Dunn, one of Biden’s top communications strategists, and Jen O’Malley Dillon, who ran Biden’s 2020 campaign and is now the deputy chief of staff at the White House.
Biden said last week that he “intends” to run in 2024 but would talk with his family before announcing a decision early next year.
Still, officials said Trump’s presence in the race would motivate him to run again. Biden views his predecessor as a danger that needs to be stopped. He regularly notes that he is the only person who has ever defeated Trump, implying that he would have the best chance of doing it again. He has publicly said he would “not be disappointed” to face Trump in a rematch.
Biden was encouraged by the better-than-expected showing among Democrats during the midterm elections. But he remains deeply unpopular himself, according to polls, and he faces political headwinds: an economy still buffeted by inflation, a deepening war in Europe, and ongoing questions
about whether he is too old for another term.
In the last year, as the midterm elections drew closer, Biden has focused increasingly on the movement that Trump created.
He assailed “300 discriminatory bills” passed by Republican legislatures. He lashed out at Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for investigating transgender families. He accused Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, of banning books; and Rick Scott, the state’s Republican senator, of a secret plot to raise taxes on Americans.
At the Democratic National
Committee, officials have kept an eye on the former president, even after he left Washington for his Mara-Lago estate in Florida. The party has assembled about 40 researchers to catalog every speech, radio address, TV appearance and newspaper article featuring Trump and other Republican candidates, in an effort to assemble the most comprehensive case against the former president and Republicans in the upcoming campaigns.
On Tuesday, the DNC announced that it would begin hiring staff in New Hampshire, Florida and other early primary states to hold
Republican presidential candidates such as Trump accountable for what they say as they begin campaigning for the White House in 2024.
It is the earliest the DNC has started making local hires before a presidential campaign, officials said.
“Today is just the kickoff to what will be a messy Republican primary, with candidates competing to be the most extreme MAGA Republican in the race,” Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. “The DNC will be ready for them all.”