He promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He asked states to deploy the National Guard to the US-Mexico border. He warned congressional Republicans to push for a perfect immigration deal — or else.
Former President Donald J. Trump hasn’t even entered the Republican presidential nomination, but he’s wasted no time issuing directives as if he were making them from the Oval Office instead of appearing in a New York courtroom.
And now, President Biden has been forced to ponder a campaign question no president has ever had to ponder: How do you run against a man who already had the job, never admitted defeat, and is already acting like he has the job again?
Mr. Trump’s strength in his party, the loyalty of his base and his quick re-emergence as the presumptive Republican nominee allow him to take issue with Mr. Biden in ways that other candidates could not.
The president’s frustrations boiled over Friday night as he struggled to save an immigration deal from collapsing in Congress. Mr. Trump has spent weeks pushing lawmakers to oppose the deal, and Republicans appear unlikely to defy him.
In an unusual statement from a president who often keeps the most sensitive negotiations private, Mr. Biden said Friday that he would close the U.S.-Mexico border under emergency authority in the deal if Republicans returned to the table and agreed to it.
“For everybody who is demanding tougher border control, this is the way to do it,” Mr. Biden said, pointing the finger at Republicans who had demanded a crackdown on the border in exchange for authorizing military aid to Ukraine. “If you’re serious about the border crisis, pass a bipartisan bill and I’ll sign it.”
Mr. Biden’s current and former advisers say the impasse over immigration highlights one of the president’s sharpest re-election bids. The fight over border policy, led by Mr Trump, “shows to the American people where the priorities of Donald Trump and the Republicans are, which is really not solving problems but scoring political points,” Kate said. Bedingfield, Mr. Biden’s former communications director.
“I’m sure President Biden is disappointed and I’m sure his team is disappointed because they’re working in good faith to try to get a border deal,” Ms. Bedingfield said. Asked what the president thinks about the threat Mr. Trump poses, she said Biden talks about Mr. Trump in private as well as in public: “He thinks he’s dangerous.”
Dan Sena, a Democratic strategist, said the campaign will have to improve, and improve faster, in dealing with Mr. Trump in real time because Mr. Trump has perfected a tactic that Mr. Biden has never mastered: creating a new narrative for the news cycle when the current one doesn’t fit.
“He really has the ability to take the oxygen out of the room and frame everything the way he wants,” said Mr. Cena, who worked to help Democrats flip the House in 2018. “They absolutely need to come clean. the record. “
There are signs that this is already happening.
On Friday, when Mr. Trump had torpedoed the border bill, Mr. Biden was quick to respond by pointing out that Republicans were walking away from a bill that would have authorized an emergency border closure.
But the former president is shadowboxing the current president in other areas as well.
On Thursday, in the midst of a defamation trial, Mr Trump posted on social media calling on “all willing states” to deploy National Guard troops to Texas “to prevent illegals from coming in and turn them back across the Border”. escalating a standoff between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Biden administration.
The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration this week, allowing federal officials to cut or remove sections of a barbed-wire fence along the border with Mexico that Texas had erected to prevent migrants from crossing into the state. Mr. Abbott has mobilized armed National Guard troops from Texas and other states to install the barrier and order migrants back to Mexico.
Karine Jean-Pierre, a White House spokeswoman, did not say whether Mr. Biden would take federal control of the Texas National Guard and called Mr. Abbott’s efforts a “political stunt.”
It’s unclear whether the answers from the Biden administration will do much to push Republicans back to the negotiating table on immigration or anything else now that Mr. Trump is flexing his muscles.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden faces low approval ratings. He is battling pessimism about the US economy, despite his efforts to showcase a healthy labor market, low inflation and infrastructure projects under his watch. And a sizable chunk of young Democratic voters deeply disapproves of his support for Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
As Mr. Biden continues to hit Mr. Trump on the campaign trail and, more subtly, at public events, Mr. Cena said Republicans may soon be forced to tone down Mr. Trump’s attacks in other areas, including of his repeated efforts to rally support for repealing the Affordable Care Act. (Mr. Trump has failed to do this many times as president.)
By now, the 14-year-old law has become popular with Americans. About 21.3 million people signed up for coverage in the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces for 2024, a record high for the third year in a row and nearly double enrollment from 2020.
“President Biden knows we have a responsibility to work across the aisle and govern with the best interests of families in mind,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates, “and if others disagree, the American people he deserves to know.”
