Washington – America can be on the right track to forget Joe Biden; Its president is not.
Donald Trump spoke the name of Biden more than a dozen times on January 20, the first day of his second presidency, and from that moment, he never stopped.
As he approaches the 100th day of his mandate, Trump invoked his predecessor with a persistence which suggests that the two are in the last pangs of a bitter campaign. They are not and will never be: Biden withdrew his name from the 2024 ballot and left the elective office for good. But for Trump, there is a certain political advantage to make Biden a perpetual bodyman.
Mention Biden reminds voters that there was not so long ago, they were not unhappy with high prices and illegal border crossings that they have repudiated it as well as his handpicked successor, Kamala Harris. Biden can also be a useful diversion of the cervical boost of the term of Trump, paying attention to the former elderly president who fought by speeches and looked unstable on his feet.
While the children pushed their pink and yellow eggs to the annual rolling of the Easter eggs in the White House on Monday, Trump mingled with the crowd and made fun of Biden on an incident that many may have forgotten, if they were aware of it. Three years ago, Biden welcomed the Easter egg roll and was redirected at some point by A Help dressed in a rabbit costume.
“Do you remember the rabbit with Joe Biden?” Said Trump. “Do you remember when the rabbit came out Joe Biden? He doesn’t come out Trump.” To this, a costume rabbit standing next to it shook his head in agreement.
Amplifying the point, the official account of the White House on X published a video of the moment with the legend “The White House is no longer a nursing home.”
In a press release from this article, the White House spokesperson Liz Huston also invoked Biden and the work that Trump has made the administration of his predecessor.
“President Trump spent the first three months of his presidency cleaning the disasters created by Joe Biden and making America again large,” said Huston. “Under the direction of President Trump, the border is safe, inflation cools, jobs are on the rise and common sense is restored.”
Trump’s comment on Biden Brims with large and small grievances. To date, he said that he has legitimately won the 2020 elections. He blamed Biden and other Democrats for the criminal investigations he faced.
“The 2020 elections were completely faked,” he told journalists last month in the Air Force One. He described Biden as a kind of presidential impostor who usurped Trump’s legitimate place and then did “such bad work”.
During his oval office meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in February, the subject turned to war between Russia and Ukraine. After blamed Biden, Trump said that it hurt him to say as much.
“I hate saying that about someone who was sitting here just before me, but he did a terrible and terrible job,” said Trump.
As unpleasant as it is, Trump rarely tires.
He called Biden “pathetic”, “sad”, “a disaster”, “incompetent” and the worst president of history. Biden had “no idea”. He “didn’t know he was alive.”
Trump’s beef extends questions of strong foreign policy to the decoration of the White House. In February, he said he approached the Biden administration with an offer to build a ballroom for the White House – something “beautiful” at a cost of around $ 100 million – but never heard.
“This question brings me back to 2017 and everyone asks me why he mentions Hillary so much,” said Michael Dubke, director of white house communications to the first term of Trump. “She lost; You have won. Let us continue, Mr. President. Aluminum foil is the key to its central premise that those who came before broken it and I will repair it.
There may be another dynamic at work. Always attentive to his popularity, Trump can see Biden as a competition for a place in history books. In the zero -sum game of the presidential classification, if Biden falls into the estimate of the story, Trump could increase.
“In Maga Land, Biden was a false president. And Trump tries to continue to strike this drum so that he could lead this story in history books,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian.
The figures tell the story – of a president who, as much as he could want to return America again, would be happy to see the Americans hate Biden forever.
So far, Trump has spoken of Biden, family or administration at least 580 times, either in public remarks, or on his social media site, according to an analysis of NBC News. It is on average six times a day of his presidency.
After winning the 2020 elections, on the other hand, Biden mentioned Trump 29 times in the first 100 days of his presidency. It is an average of once every 3 and a half years. Even then, he did it with a certain reluctance.
“I’m tired of talking about Donald Trump,” said Biden at a town hall style event.
Last month, Trump used a television event presenting Elon Musk’s Tesla vehicles to take several excavations in Biden. Holding notes showing the prices of Tesla cars, Trump said: “They gave me notes. I said:” I am not Biden, I don’t need notes. “”
He then mounted in a red model sitting on the southern lawn of the White House.
“Do you think Biden could enter this car?” He told assembled journalists.
Trump gave no signs that his concern with Biden would be available. He uses the wide communication tools available to a president to keep his predecessor at the front and center, with aid and subordinates arising to support the beat of beat.
Trump’s press secretary in the White House, Karoline Leavitt, said Biden 78 times in the 16 briefings she has given so far, Including 37 times without obligation in its opening remarks.
The members of the cabinet also entered the act. When he was called during a cabinet television meeting on April 10, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the environmental protection agency, opened its doors with “President, EPA Biden strangles the economy”.
Later in Reunion, when it was in turn to speak, Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, told Trump: “You entered an emergency situation where President Biden left us a trade deficit of $ 1.2 Billion of dollars. It is the largest country in human history. ” (A number of economists argue that the management of a trade deficit is not necessarily harmful. The United States obtains precious goods in return.)
Trump jumped into it.
“You said the biggest in history, right?” Said Trump. “There was never what he left us. He left us a waste. All his administration was a mess.”
Four other officials at the table of the cabinet hall that day – Interior secretary Doug Burgum, the Secretary of Transports Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and Kelly Loeffler, head of the Small Business Administration – also used their public remarks to make the Biden administration.
Sometimes the convivial conservative media in Trump have new opportunities for him to break Biden. At a joint press conference in the White House with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a journalist from the Gateway expert asked Modi if he was more confident of a successful relationship with the United States under Trump “against the incompetence and weakness of Biden in the past four years”.
Before Modi could answer, Trump laughed.
“I agree with you,” he said. “Yeah, gross incompetence.”
Since he took office, Trump aid have exercised more strict control over the authorized media on Air Force One and in smaller spaces that can only accommodate a certain number of journalists.
In February, the White House stripped the Associated Press of its traditional place in the small group of journalists authorized to cover the president in such contexts, citing his refusal to designate the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”, the name of Trump.
No journalist AP was on board during an Air Force flight on April 13 when Trump stopped in the press cabin to answer questions. A journalist from the voice of the real America was however on the plane, and at one point, asked this question: “How do you do, Mr. President?”
“Biden was already sleeping for 10 hours,” said Trump.
Asked about Trump’s fixing with Biden, an assistant from the White House to the former president said: “It’s weird.”
“I think it is his attempt to distract what he does to the economy. I also don’t think he is on the fact that Biden defeated him in 2020,” added the person, speaking under the cover of anonymity to speak freely.
Denouncing Biden is quite easy; Prove that the point is more difficult.
Trump reproached Biden for granted Ukrainian aid in the form of a subsidy, as opposed to Europe, which, according to him, will recover his money. Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron corrected him on this point during distinct oval office meetings.
He accused Biden of armed the government and said that he had ended the practice. Trump’s detractors say that he used his power to retaliate against perceived political enemies, of which Chris Krebs, who was a head of internal security in the first mandate. Trump has signed an executive memo this month, stopping the Krebs security authorization. Among the sins set out in the memo was the denial of Krebs that the 2020 elections were “rigged and stolen”.
An argument that Trump makes is that Russian President Vladimir Putin lacked respect to Biden so much that he felt free to wage war in Ukraine. Now that Biden has left and Trump is back in the White House, “President Putin wants to have peace,” Trump told journalists in February.
Putin, he said, “didn’t want to have peace with Biden. And you tell me why, ok?”
Although Trump promised during the campaign to end the war during his first day of president, administration officials recently seemed to resign to his continuation. Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this month that the United States could be ready to “pass” his attempts to negotiate a peace agreement.
As the 100 -day milestone approaches, Trump approaches the point where it becomes more and more difficult to blame Biden for what is wrong.
Trump’s starting and stopping approach to world prices has shaken the financial markets, dating plans 401 (K) on which millions of people count for retirement. Consumer confidence has dropped.
People can now be less interested in what Biden has done than by the way Trump will dig a rooted hole in his level commercial policies.
“It becomes always more difficult to blame the current conditions on your predecessor the more you get further from your predecessor,” said Whit Ayres, a republican sounder. “This is particularly true for the economy, which reacted quite strongly to Trump prices and the trade war.”
