“He only cares about holding on to power. I care about you.”
If you haven’t seen Trump’s “Reich” video, that’s it. He didn’t make it but he did share it. Nazis just love the guy. Republicans say it’s no biggie:
Here’s Biden’s response:
Dan Pfeiffer looks at the strategy behind the Biden campaign’s approach in his newsletter:
What’s interesting to me is how and why the Biden Campaign is waging the fight this time and what it says about their strategy.
Keep Trump on the Defensive and in the News
Since officially kicking off the campaign earlier this year, the Biden Campaign has aggressively pursued every Trump misstatement and misdeed. Their BidenHQ account tweets day and night to lift up everything Trump does — from falling asleep in court to suggesting he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
It is in their strategic interest to focus the electorate on Trump and remind them who he is and what kind of President he was. This is also why Biden is so eager to debate Trump. This election is currently functioning as a referendum on Biden, and they very much need it to become a choice between two candidates.
I have made this point many times in this newsletter, but most voters never see or think about Trump. The only way to learn about the news is to actively seek it out, so it’s in the Biden Campaign’s interest to pour gasoline on the controversies that break out of the political news bubble and go viral on social media.
People Know Less than You Think
It feels like Trump has been in our lives for seven millennia and that everyone knows everything there is to know about him, but some recent polling from Blueprint Research shows that’s not actually the case. As Russell Berman wrote in The Atlantic:
In polling conducted by Blueprint, a Democratic data firm, fewer than half of registered voters under 30 said they had heard some of Trump’s most incendiary quotes, such as when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” demonstrating in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, or when he told members of the Proud Boys, the far-right militia group, to “stand back and stand by” during a 2020 debate. Just 42 percent of respondents were aware that, during his 2016 campaign, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
There is a clear upside in highlighting Trump’s comments and contextualizing them against his other misdeeds and cruel words. This is particularly important for Biden who decided to run for President specifically because of what happened in Charlottesville.
Fitting It into the Broader Narrative
Democrats are destined to repeat the mistakes of 2016 and swing at every pitch if we don’t stitch together a broader narrative about Trump. On Monday, he’s a moron; on Tuesday, a criminal; on Wednesday, a feeble old man; and on Thursday, he’s a dangerously powerful dictator. The way Biden responded to the Trump video was a fascinating window into what he views as the best attack against Trump — “He only cares about holding on to power. I care about you.”
He then references this interesting piece:
A short excerpt follows. (You can use the gift link by clicking on that tweet above to read the whole thing and it’s worth it.)
Seiji Carpenter, vice president at David Binder Research, noticed this fear in early April while conducting focus groups of people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but became disillusioned and were considering switching sides. “We were talking to Latino men and Asian American-Pacific Islander women in battleground states,” Carpenter recalls, “and they went straight to the issue of, what if Trump won’t give up power?”
Carpenter has a decade of experience running focus groups for Democrats, but he’d never encountered this fear in earlier cycles. “It’s not something we’d been testing for,” he says. “But what we’ve seen so far indicates a real concern there.”
Republican strategists have encountered the same thing. “It’s showing up in our focus groups,” says Sarah Longwell, the chief executive officer of Longwell Partners and publisher of the conservative website the Bulwark. “It happened just the other day.”Longwell shared a video of a group of undecided swing-state voters who had been asked if they were worried that Trump might violate the constitutional amendment limiting him to one more term if he wins in November.
“Does anybody think he may not abide by the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution and leave office after the 2028 election? Anyone worried about that?” the moderator asked.In response, seven of the eight participants raised a hand. A Pennsylvania man worried that Trump might go further and try to institute a dynasty. “I wouldn’t put it past him, now that he owns the RNC,” the man said, “to say, ‘Don Jr. is going to do the next term, and he’ll get two. And then Barron will get two.’ And we’ll just have some fake monarchy.”
As far-fetched as it may sound, the prospect of Trump overriding or simply ignoring the constitutional provision that limits a president to serving two terms seems to be pushing some undecided voters toward Biden, despite significant reservations about the incumbent’s age, turmoil in the Middle East and high inflation. Now strategists in both parties are probing to see how widely this sentiment has spread, particularly among the undecided voters likely to sway the election.
He’s said repeatedly that he thinks he should have more than two terms. Just last weekend at the NRA convention he talked about it again:
“You know, FDR 16 years — almost 16 years — he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?”
“Three!” shouted some convention attendees,
Green notes:
The fear that Trump might do something unprecedented to undermine democracy is a new variable in an otherwise familiar race between two unpopular candidates who’ve faced off before. Several political professionals who talk to voters for a living say they’ve detected a fundamental shift in the way people view Trump’s motivations and intentions as compared with other politicians.
“Typically, when we raise concerns about a candidate’s agenda, people are skeptical and want to do their own research first or think it’s an attack,” says Carpenter, the focus group director. “With Trump, that’s not true. Voters believe that he would try to remove term limits, and they’re nervous about what’s possible.”
This would explain why the Biden campaign is hitting the “Trump only cares about power” message. It rings true.
And that’s because it is true.