Biden Tries to Reassure Supporters During July 4 Events: Live Election Updates
Amid the flurry of Democrats’ questioning whether President Biden should or will remain his party’s presidential nominee, former President Donald J. Trump has stayed unusually quiet on the issue publicly.
Mr. Trump, rarely one to shy away from sharing his opinion, has not been fully silent since last week’s debate, giving a handful of radio interviews and keeping up a steady stream of posts and videos on his social media platform, Truth Social. But Mr. Trump has largely sat back and allowed the Democratic Party to dominate the debate over Mr. Biden’s political future, in a signal of his preferred opponent.
After months of relentlessly attacking Mr. Biden as too physically and mentally weak to lead the country, the former president has been content to let the news coverage of Democrats’ doubting their party’s leader take hold, according to two advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.
His relative lack of public comments on the issue also to some extent reflects his desire for Mr. Biden to stay in the race and his confidence that he can easily beat the president in November, one of the advisers said.
A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after the debate and released on Wednesday suggested that some Republican voters agreed: 28 percent of them said they thought Mr. Biden should remain the Democratic nominee, an uptick from 21 percent in a poll conducted before the debate.
On Monday, Mr. Trump publicly dismissed the idea that the president would be replaced on the Democratic ticket.
“If you listen to the professionals that do this stuff, they say it’s very hard for anybody else to come into the race,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with John Reid, a Virginia-based talk radio host.
And in an echo of a talking point that Mr. Biden’s Democratic allies have long wielded to argue that he is best positioned to beat the former president, Mr. Trump has also argued that polling showed that “Biden does better than the people they’re talking about using to replace him.”
The day after the debate, he argued at a rally in Virginia that Mr. Biden polled better in head-to-head matchups against him than did either Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he said he would “be very happy” to run against, or Michelle Obama, the former first lady.
Two polls released on Tuesday somewhat deflated that claim: A CNN poll found that Ms. Harris polled two percentage points ahead of Mr. Biden in a hypothetical contest against Mr. Trump, though he still defeated her. And an Ipsos/Reuters poll found that Mrs. Obama — a long-shot potential option for Democrats given that she has repeatedly said she has no interest in running — beat Mr. Trump, 50 percent to 39 percent, in a hypothetical matchup.
Mr. Trump did appear to delight in mocking his rival in a raw video first reported by The Daily Beast on Wednesday and later shared by Mr. Trump. It was not clear who originally shot the clip or what day it was filmed. As he golfed on his property in New Jersey, Mr. Trump referred to Mr. Biden as “that old broken down pile of crap” and suggested he would quit the race, according to the video of his comments.
If Mr. Biden…
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