Donald Trump will pull off his greatest feat yet as Joe Biden confronts his darkest hour.
The ex-president, 78, will accept the Republican nomination Thursday, advancing one of the most stunning comebacks in political history after his bid to steal the 2020 election, an unprecedented criminal conviction and an assassination attempt.
Biden, 81, is meanwhile being rocked by a Democratic rebellion. Concerns about whether he can again defeat his 2020 opponent have boiled back up amid lawmakers’ concerns about his health and cognitive state and despair over his chances of blocking the extreme possibilities of a second Trump term. Sources told CNN Wednesday that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently told the president that polls show he can’t beat Trump and could crush Democratic hopes of winning the House if he stays in the race.
A White House race that slumbered for months has suddenly erupted over a momentous three weeks bookended by Biden’s cataclysmic debate performance and the attempted assassination of Trump – a whiplash of events unseen in half a century.
The 45th president’s comeback will only be fully realized if he becomes the second one-term president to win a return to the White House in November. But his rebound to this point may be even more unlikely than his unexpected win in the 2016 election. His return to the top of the GOP ticket means it is now clear that Trump was not simply an aberration, but is becoming a historic political force who has utterly transformed his party and could do the same for the nation, for better or worse, if he comes back to White House on January 20, 2025.
Events play into Trump’s election strategy
In a race Trump has cast as a contrast between strength and weakness, the optics are better than the Republican can have dared hope less than four months before Election Day.
Republicans are lionizing a nominee who escaped a would-be assassin’s bullet and rose, bloodied, to raise his fist with a vow to “fight.” Biden, by comparison, retreated from the campaign trail Wednesday to his Delaware home with a case of Covid-19.
Trump just choreographed one of the most remarkable shows of dominance in any political party of the modern age, requiring his vanquished primary foes to pledge fealty in front of a primetime television audience at the convention on Tuesday. Biden is, meanwhile, losing control of his party, clashing heatedly with lawmakers who warn he’ll cost them the White House, Senate and the House and as party grandees — like California Rep. Adam Schiff — publicly say he should step aside.
The electoral map reflects the diverging fortunes of the two candidates. Trump leads most national polls and has the advantage in battleground states. And while the situation is not yet unrecoverable for Biden, most analysts believe he has a limited path to 270 electoral votes through Blue Wall states Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. His campaign insists it’s not given up elsewhere.
Presidential elections are won by votes of millions of Americans in the fall – not snapshots of the relative fortunes of campaigns in July. And Trump’s apparent momentum may have been inflated by a convention that is showcasing a party he has stripped of all dissenting voices in an eight-year political purge. The ex-president remains deeply unpopular nationally and millions of Americans disdain his personality cult, record of racially inflammatory rhetoric and his authoritarian instincts. But that’s one reason why his campaign is pulling its punches on Biden in the hope he stays in the race.
The growing threat to Biden’s campaign is not being driven by pundits; it’s coming from deep inside his party by lawmakers and donors who fear a GOP landslide in November.
As the Democratic Party threatens to tear itself apart, the Trump GOP has shown rare discipline and unity — underpinned by a growing belief by delegates here in Milwaukee that the former president is headed back to the White House.
After Trump escaped the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, his campaign has leveraged the aftermath to reshape his image. It has also portrayed his four years in power as an idyll of peace and prosperity. His team is seeking to dispel memories of the chaos, acrimony and assaults on constitutional order that characterized his presidency, which culminated in his attempt to destroy democracy to stay in power and the mob riot by his supporters at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, that led to his second impeachment.
The GOP is painting a picture of a nation that is broke, beset by crime and an invasion by undocumented migrants, and economic blight disrespected in the world. The picture is highly subjective. Americans are still suffering from high prices, but inflation isn’t as high as it was, crime figures are coming down and unemployment has been near historic lows. The economy is outpacing other developed countries and Trump thwarted a bid to ease the immigration crisis by torpedoing a bipartisan bill that could have addressed the border. And in perhaps the most daring bait-and-switch, the party led by a man who constantly genuflected to President Vladimir Putin is accusing Biden – who reinvigorated NATO and confronted the Kremlin’s onslaught on Ukraine – as weak on Russia.
The image making was taken to new levels by Trump’s new vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, in his address to the GOP convention Wednesday evening. The Ohio Republican senator wove a parable of national redemption from the horrific scenes in Pennsylvania when Trump fell to the ground but reemerged wounded but unbowed.
“Go and watch the video of a would-be assassin coming a quarter of an inch from taking his life,” Vance told a spellbound crowd of delegates. “Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump. And then look at the photo of him defiant – fist in the air. When Donald J. Trump rose to his feet in that Pennsylvania field, all of America stood up with him.”
“Donald Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what – if lost – may never be found again.”
Biden’s hold on the Democratic nomination appears to weaken
As Trump settled in to enjoy the national debut of his new protege, the revolt aimed at pushing Biden out of the race burst back into the open, despite the spotlight shined on the Republican convention in Milwaukee.
Schiff became the most high-profile Democrat to publicly calling for the president to “pass the torch.” The California Democrat said in a statement that, by leaving, Biden could “secure his legacy of leadership by allowing us to defeat Donald Trump in the upcoming election.” The intervention was seen as especially significant since Schiff, who is running for the Senate, is very close to Pelosi, the ultimate Democratic powerbroker who many in her party hope will be able to finesse a transition to another presidential candidate. But Biden pushed back in his call with Pelosi, telling her that he has seen polling that indicates that he can still win, CNN reported Wednesday.
Signs of dissent toward Biden grew as details emerged of an ill-tempered clash with lawmakers over the weekend. Two sources described the remarkable encounter to CNN’s Dana Bash that included an exchange with Rep. Jason Crow, an Iraq war veteran who told the president that voters are not seeing the election the way the president is. At one point, Biden told the Colorado Democrat, “I don’t want to hear that crap,” and said that while he knows Crow is a Bronze Star recipient, like his son Beau, “he didn’t rebuild NATO.”
Another Democratic lawmaker, Pennsylvania Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, told Biden that he was losing ground in her state. The president told Houlahan that his team would get her talking points about all of the things that he has done for Pennsylvania and reminded her that he married a “Philly girl.”
By evening, there were fresh signs that Biden’s reelection effort was again plunging into critical territory. ABC News reported that in a meeting at Biden’s beach house on Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer shared the concerns of his caucus about Biden’s campaign. The leader’s spokesman said in a statement that the report was “idle speculation.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also had a meeting with Biden last week. The leader’s spokesperson said in a statement: “On behalf of the House Democratic caucus, he directly expressed the full breadth of insight, perspective and conclusions reached about the path forward - after extensive colleague to colleague discussions. Any further characterization of the private, one-on-one meeting between President Biden and Leader Jeffries is speculative and uninformed.”
Biden has publicly shut down every suggestion that he should step aside, despite overwhelming public concerns that he would not be able to fully serve out a second term that would end when he is 86. He insists he is the strongest candidate to take on Trump in November. But doubts that he is getting a full picture of his vulnerable political standing grew Wednesday with the release of an AP-NORC poll showing that a 65% majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say Biden “should withdraw and allow his party to select a different candidate.”
As the bad news rolled in for the president, one senior Democratic advisor told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny that Biden was being more “receptive” in private and not as defiant as he was in public as discussions with Capitol Hill Democrats continue.
“He’s gone from saying, ‘Kamala can’t win,’ to ‘Do you think Kamala can win?’” the adviser said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. “It’s still unclear where he’s going to land but seems to be listening,” the source said.
The latest speculation over Biden’s future represents a cruel twist for a president who spent a lifetime pursuing the highest office, who defied expectations by reviving a moribund primary campaign to triumph over Trump in 2020 and who has endured a lifetime of personal tragedy. But the erosion in the president’s position over the last 21 days was precipitated by his disastrous showing in a debate in which he appeared frail and sometimes confused in a way that validated the concerns of many voters.
The situation is especially agonizing for the president, since he views his campaign in existential terms and as a battle to save the soul of America from what he sees as Trump’s mortal threat to democracy. The ex-president spent four years testing the rule of law and the limits of executive power in office and is vowing to pursue a campaign of personal retribution if he is reelected.
And the fact that the Republican Party is crowning a convicted felon, who was found guilty in his New York hush money case, who lost a massive civil fraud trial and was found liable for sexual assault, has been all but lost in the rush of attention Trump has achieved after the heinous attempt on his life on Saturday.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly quoted Biden. It also has been updated to reflect that Jeffries met with Biden last week.
