Donald Trump had recently been indicted—in New York state court, on charges connected to his alleged payoff to adult film actor Stormy Daniels—when I asked an aide to Joe Biden whether the former president’s legal troubles were good or bad news for the current White House. “We don’t talk about this at all,” the insider said in April, firmly. “We steer completely clear of it.” That resolve held through May, when a jury found Trump was liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. Even when asked directly by the press about the jury’s decision in Carroll’s case, Biden said he could not comment.
Trump’s latest indictment, on federal charges connected to his handling of classified government documents, will test that strategy yet again. The prevailing Biden team response on the political ramifications of Trump’s deepening legal entanglements has and will wisely continue to be no response, at least publicly. To say anything of substance would risk playing into Trump’s spin that the indictments are politically motivated, designed to damage the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. On Thursday, toward the end of an unrelated White House press conference, as action by Special Counsel Jack Smith seemed imminent, Biden answered a question about Justice Department independence in the Trump investigation. “I have never once, not one single time, suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do relative to bringing a charge or not bringing a charge. I’m honest,” Biden said, rapping his knuckles on the lectern for emphasis. Surely, in the coming days, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will repeat variations of that refrain: The matter is in the legal system, we don’t have any comment.
And the truth is that even the president’s most trusted aides can’t know where this all leads. Trump, who has pleaded not guilty, is scheduled to go on trial in New York in March 2024, which would add an enormous, volatile spectacle to the election cycle. “Just about everything in Trump’s political career is unprecedented,” a Biden adviser says. “Who really knows?”
Trump, counterintuitively, would bring an element of predictability in 2024, which is why a rematch with the former president is viewed as the Biden team’s preferred contest. “Against Trump, it’s an easy contrast, a known contrast,” says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist for both of Barack Obama’s winning White House runs. “We have the receipts of what Trump is and who Trump is, and we know what he gets—he’s a 46% candidate in multiple elections. I don’t know what Nikki Haley’s ceiling is. I don’t know what Ron DeSantis’s ceiling is. Is it higher than 46%, 47%? It’s possible. That’s why they’re X factors that I’d rather not run against.”
All the legal uncertainty surrounding the former president complicates the picture somewhat. Two things seem fairly certain, though. Trump will continue to try to use the prosecutions as badges of martyrdom, and his hard-core followers will buy into that narrative. Maybe that will be enough to allow Trump to again emerge from a fractured Republican primary field. How it would play in a general election—where Biden’s allies, if not the president’s campaign, would likely then spend heavily to highlight Trump’s dubious legal record for swing voters—is more difficult to forecast. But the president’s highly disciplined team won’t allow itself to get caught looking that far ahead, and certainly not speculating about it to reporters. Instead, it will continue to promote Biden’s first-term accomplishments and draw attention to the restoration of relative normalcy in Washington. “America has made up its mind on the personalities of Trump and Biden,” the presidential adviser says. “It’s going to come down to, What have these people done for me?” That was the greater significance of the president’s Oval Office speech pegged to the resolution of the debt ceiling crisis—not the policy details, but underscoring Biden’s “bipartisan” message by reaching the deal.
“If you look at any incumbent’s campaign in the last 30, 40 years,” Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden, told me earlier this spring, “you will see that part of the fun of being an incumbent is getting to watch the other party’s primary process.” With two indictments hanging over him, and possibly more to come, Trump keeps making the drama ever more queasily compelling. The larger question is whether the Republican primaries eventually yield an even wilder card general election opponent for Biden.
Chris Smith
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