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After his surprisingly weak debate performances, President Joe Biden is adopting a Trump-style strategy: urging voters to not abandon him despite the obvious flaws in his campaign and to ignore doubts about his fitness to serve as president.
“I wouldn’t be running again if I didn’t believe with every fiber of my being that I could do this job,” Biden, 81, said Friday in an attempt to reassure a crowd at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds.
But that wasn’t what it seemed like on Thursday when Biden struggled in a debate with former President Donald Trump, political strategists told Business Insider.
“It’s been a disaster for President Biden,” Alex Zdan, a Republican political strategist and former New Jersey GOP senatorial candidate, told BI. “It was like a train wreck. Hitting a volcano, going into a black hole, going into a comet. It was the worst-case scenario. What everyone feared has come true. It’s so bad that conservative Republicans who never thought they’d feel this way before are expressing sympathy for the president.”
Some of Biden’s staunchest Democratic defenders are now publicly calling on him to drop out of the race. So far, Biden has ignored them, urging voters to forgive his weary and sometimes incoherent debate performance.
“I don’t walk as easily as I used to,” Biden said Friday in North Carolina, “I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I know: I know how to tell the truth.”
Representatives for the Biden campaign did not immediately respond to BI’s request for comment.
But ignoring concerns about Biden’s intellectual acuity and competence would mean ignoring obvious shortcomings, likely to the detriment of his own campaign, two public relations experts said.
“Given the controversy over Biden’s age and public concerns about his mental health, that performance may have swayed undecided voters to either vote for Donald Trump or not vote at all,” Triana PR consultant David Triana told BI. “Given that Democrats are suggesting that Biden should step aside in November to give someone else a chance, and that the media is pushing Gavin Newsom to do just that, I think this crisis has reached DEFCON 1.”
Biden’s current refusal to acknowledge his shortcomings and his persistence in the race despite calls for him to withdraw is reminiscent of Trump’s classic strategy of ignoring and deflecting criticism, Triana said. Dustin Siggins, a former political journalist and now public relations consultant, agreed.
Siggins said both candidates are stubborn, and that stubbornness has bred success in rewarding fields like politics and business.
“But Trump’s habits are both choices and part of his natural personality,” Siggins told BI. “As we saw on Thursday night, Joe Biden appears too cognitively impaired to comprehend how he appears to the country at large.”
Not everyone sees Biden’s persistence in the race as an act of ego or arrogance. Brand strategist Rebecca Horan called it “normal for any politician.”
“First, he’s still the president, so dropping out of the race because of his age would seem like an admission by MAGA Republicans that he’s not fit to be president, and it’s easy to see why that would be difficult,” Horan told BI. “I also think there’s a certain amount of optimism in Biden’s tenacity, an ‘I can fix this’ attitude. He believes he’s in the best interest of the country.”
Triana believes Biden would step down if the Democratic Party overwhelmingly agreed that he should, another difference between the two candidates.
How far are the similarities?
A second Trump presidency would be a very different America than if Biden won a second term. Trump has promised to frame a second term as “revenge” against his political opponents and has threatened to prosecute Biden if a federal court does not grant him immunity. Authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder worries that democracy may not survive if Trump wins again.
Trump is asking Americans to ignore his lies about the events of January 6, 2021 and the 2020 election. He is also asking them to ignore his 34 felony convictions related to hush money payments to pornography actors. He wants voters to forget that he still faces three criminal cases, two of which center on allegations that he attempted to subvert American democracy. He also wants voters to forget that he was impeached twice in his first year in office.
Trump also wants us to forget his own lies, which numbered at least 30 as of Thursday night (Biden had nine, according to The Fact Checker). They included grossly exaggerating the state of the economy during Trump’s time in office, exaggerating the size of the U.S. trade deficit with China and falsely claiming that the Biden administration was weak on border policy.
The Republican Party has, for the most part, bravely followed this selective amnesia. Politicians who haven’t have mostly found themselves defeated in primaries or isolated as cable TV commentators.
When reached for comment by BI, a representative for the Trump campaign did not respond to questions about the similarities between Trump and Biden. Instead, a spokesperson pointed to former President Biden’s recent statement He claimed victory in Thursday’s debate.
Harm to democracy?
The election will ultimately be decided by independents, undecided voters and people who might not even turn out to vote. For Biden to have a chance to win, he needs that base to ignore his poor debate performance and questions about his age. The question then is, will they show up to vote in November?
Even some of Biden’s most ardent supporters worry that he is no longer his best chance of beating Trump and is instead a hindrance in the fight against him.
“One of Biden’s main arguments is preserving democracy: ‘Trump tried to start an insurrection on January 6th, and I’m the one who’s going to stop it,'” Christian Gross, a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Southern California, told BI. “If Democrats are now calling on Biden to resign or not run, that argument is undermined.”
Qasim Rashid, a human rights lawyer and former Democratic candidate for Congress in Virginia and Illinois, told BI that Biden’s dignity and accomplishments need to be protected and that an exit strategy needs to be created that “maintains momentum for protecting our democracy, fighting for economic justice, and following our values so that 2024 is not the last presidential election but a stepping stone to 2028, 2032, and so on.”
“At the end of the day, my number one priority is how do we protect our democracy,” Rashid said. “If the evidence points to Biden’s case, that’s fine. But the evidence is now starting to show pretty compellingly that there is a better option, and we should take that seriously. It’s up to Biden and his team and the Democratic Party to listen to that.”
The New York Times editorial board argued that Biden’s continued campaign would ultimately be harmful to democracy. In an op-ed published Friday, the board said the greatest public service Biden could do now would be to end his reelection campaign.
Refusing to do so, the committee wrote, would put the United States at risk of the fate Biden sought to avoid by running in the first place: Trump’s reelection.
“The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by lies is to deal honestly with the American people: by acknowledging that Biden cannot continue the campaign and creating a process to select someone more qualified to replace him and defeat Trump in November,” the Times editorial board wrote. “This is their best chance to protect the soul of the nation – the cause for which Biden ran in 2019 – from Trump’s malicious distortion. And it is the best service Biden can provide the country he has nobly served for so many years.”