Hardly a day goes by no matter where he is in the world that President Donald Trump doesn’t attack for Vice President and present Democratic 2020 front runner Joe Biden. He more than anyone is the one person that Trump knows will crush his reelection chances.
Over the weekend in Japan during a state visit in a joint with his host President
Shinzo Abe Trump stunned everyone, including his host by siding with North Korea’s brutal dictator Kim Jong Un over a former Vice President of the United States. Trump took the side of a man who not only kills his own people for disagreeing with him but also killed an American college student and oh by the way North Korea also could wipe Japan off the face of the earth with a couple of their nukes.
“Kim Jong Un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low IQ individual. He probably is based on his record. I think I agree with him on that,” Trump said while standing alongside Japanese Prime Minister Abe at a press conference in Tokyo.
When he was asked a follow-up question, Trump railed on the Obama administration’s foreign policy with regards to North Korea and Iran, singling out the Iran nuclear deal as a disaster.
“I don’t take sides as to who I’m in favor of, who I’m not,” Trump added. “But I can tell you that Joe Biden was a disaster. His administration with President Obama, they were basically a disaster when it came to so many things.”
So, President Trump showed again that his disdain for form President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden shows no bounds. He violated the unwritten rule not criticizing former U.S. leaders on foreign land.
But back in the good old USA Biden does not fear Trump, as a matter of fact, he wants to face him more than anything he has ever done in his long political career. Now, Biden is not a lock to win the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination and there is a long way to go on that front.
There are plenty of talented Democrats in a group of 20 plus presidential candidates that could unseat President Trump in the fall of 2020. But for now there is the only one that has spooked the man in the White House and that is Biden.
What happened is that Biden was smart to open his campaign but putting a target on Trump’s back and tell the president that he is coming for him. Biden is a street fighter who Trump knows will not back down or wilt from attacks on Twitter or speeches to his MAGA wearing followers.
Let’s be clear that the president’s Bidenphobia is legitimate. As Politico reports, Trump’s own internal polling finds Biden outperforming him in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—three crucial states that swung for Trump in 2016 by less than 1 percentage point. Trump and the G.O.P. have responded by investing heavily in the Rust Belt, financially (funneling money to the languishing Wisconsin party), strategically (persuading Michigan to not back a controversial Senate candidate who might provoke higher Democratic turnout), and branding-wise (deploying Mike Pence to campaign across the three states in recent weeks). Poll after poll shows Biden would handily beat Trump in a general election, in large part because those three states seem up for grabs.
Now I know that Trump supporters will jump on “Well the polls in 2016 got it wrong.” Yes, they did but that was when Trump was an unknown quantity and he was facing possibly the only candidate he could have beaten in Hilary Clinton.
Biden is far more popular than Clinton and we now have four years of data on Trump. So yes those polls are far more telling than they were in 2016.
Then besides a fear of Biden President Trump is upset over a certain media outlet. Yes, Fox News is now getting some special attention from the White House.
Vanity Fair had a very interesting article expressing President Trump’s fear that Fox News is no longer 24/7/365 behind him.
According to the article – A related fear, as Trump revealed during the Pennsylvania rally, is that Fox News, his trusty propaganda arm, may not function as the political weapon he had hoped. The primetime lineup, of course, remains competitive with North Korean propaganda in its slavish loyalty to the president. But daytime anchors including Shep Smith, Arthel Neville, and Leland Vittert have unnerved Trump with their insufficient devotion to the party line. Worse, top Fox brass have—who might just care about ratings more than the president’s feelings—agreed to a number of town hall events with Democrats including Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, both of whom were warmly received by Fox News audiences. Kirsten Gillibrand is also scheduled along with others to appear in the coming weeks.
The Vanity Fair story went on to quote President Trump:
“What’s going on with Fox, by the way? . . . They’re putting more Democrats on than Republicans.” Trump said Monday. “Something strange is going on at Fox, folks! Something very strange!” he continued, leading to one of the more unusual sights in this election cycle: a crowd of MAGA voters booing Fox News.
So, here we are about a month from the first set of Democratic Candidate Debates and Biden has President Trump doing what Satchel Page once cautioned his opponents never to do/. Satchel famously said “Don’t look back someone might be gaining on you.”
