Biden’s Strategy to Make the Race About Trump Is Suddenly in Doubt
The New York Times
The Biden campaign’s effort to raise questions about Donald J. Trump’s ability to be president has boomeranged into a referendum on the president’s own competence.
From the outset of President Biden’s re-election campaign, the plan for winning was to make former President Donald J. Trump so unpalatable that voters uneasy with the incumbent would vote for him anyway.
But now Mr. Biden is stuck in a political tailspin, with an abysmal debate performance highlighting his inability to make a case against Mr. Trump and prompting a collective national hand-wringing about his ability to do his job while an increasing number of House Democrats say he should leave the race. To get voters to focus on the threats posed by a second Trump administration, Mr. Biden’s own allies say he first must escape his current doom loop and convince voters — even and especially fellow Democrats — that he is up to the job himself.
“The focus has to shift back to Trump and what rights we lose if he’s president,” said Representative Eric Swalwell of California, who ran against Mr. Biden for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. “The last three elections have shown us if you’re the focus, you lose.”
Indeed, the Biden campaign has long sought to make Mr. Trump its focus.
That’s why Mr. Biden kicked off this year with a blistering speech about Mr. Trump’s attempt to overthrow the last election, why his allies spent millions to block the No Labels effort and why the president has tried to highlight the anniversaries of news regarding abortion rights.
And it is why Mr. Biden’s top aides thought it was a good idea to move the first debate from September to June — to give voters the one-on-one look at Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump that the president’s team thought would recalibrate the race, lift Mr. Biden’s sagging poll numbers and remind voters what would change if Mr. Trump takes office again in January.
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.