Trump is a ringmaster of multiple sideshows as Biden cranks up pace of reelection bid

Donald Trump is running one of the strangest general election campaigns America has ever seen.

He’s hawking Bibles, attacking judges, making billions in the stock market and boasting about his golf game. On Thursday, the ex-president traveled to New York to attend the wake of a fallen police officer – on a trip that allowed him to deepen his characterization of a nation adrift and plagued by crime under President Joe Biden.But there wasn’t much in Trump’s busy week that resembled a conventional general election campaign – certainly not one that might address some of his biggest liabilities as he seeks a return to the White House.

That’s a sharp contrast to Biden, who this week wrapped up his post State of the Union tour in North Carolina. The state was in Trump’s column in 2020 and 2016, but Democrats think they can put it back in play. On Thursday night, the president put on a show of Democratic unity and invoked the party’s glory days at an event in New York with ex-Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that the campaign said ahead of time had raised more than $25 million. Those big bucks could be critical in what is likely to be a tight race with Trump that could be decided by a few hundred thousand votes across a handful of states.

One attendee told CNN after leaving the off-camera fundraiser that the three presidents spoke repeatedly about the threat a second Trump term would pose, with Biden saying the former president would tear up the Constitution and alluding to Trump’s comment that he’d only be a dictator on “day one.” Videos released by the Biden campaign Friday morning showed a light-hearted moment in which moderator Stephen Colbert contrasted Biden’s busy schedule with Trump’s golf activities, as well as Biden’s warning that democracy is “literally at stake.”

Biden and his team have also been aggressively taking the campaign to Trump on policy. For instance, they used this week’s Supreme Court arguments over restricting access to an abortion drug to accuse the former president of ripping away women’s reproductive services with his construction of a deeply conservative majority whose overturning of Roe v. Wade has set off a cascade of consequences.

Trump – breaking all the rules, as usual

Trump has always been an outlier. And his refusal to play by the rules of a normal campaign is the key to his political appeal among supporters who despise governing elites. Biden is working in a traditional campaign lane, seeking to repair cracks in his coalition among young people, Black voters and disaffected Democrats. But the presumptive Republican nominee’s strategy can best be understood at this point as a merger of his legal defense in multiple cases – in which he claims he’s the victim of political persecution – and as a series of photo ops meant to harness the attention he craves.

On Monday, for instance, the former president chose to show up in court in New York and then threw a tantrum when a judge set an April 15 trial date in a case related to a hush money payment to an adult film star. Trump was back in his former home state on Thursday, attending a wake for a fallen police officer on Long Island. Afterwards, he described the officer’s murder as a “sad, sad event” and used the occasion to spell out a searing message. “We have to get back to law and order,” he said, seeking to portray the US under Biden as a crime-ridden dystopia. But characteristically, while he used pointed rhetoric, the ex-president failed to offer specific policies to improve the situation as a typical presidential candidate might.

On Thursday, the ex-president criticized his successor for not showing up at the wake, and tried to revive the Republican narrative that Democrats are insufficiently supportive of the police that his party used repeatedly in the aftermath of nationwide protests about incidents of police brutality against Black men. “I think that politically he can’t support the police. I think he’s also making a mistake,” Trump said of Biden in the interview recorded after the wake. “But I think politically, his base won’t let him support the police. And I support the police.”