‘Mental Masturbation’: Trump Camp Dismisses Dem Talk of Shoving Biden Aside
The Trump campaign is operating as if Biden will stay on the ticket.
JOE BIDEN HAS NO PLANS TO QUIT the presidential race. Nor does Donald Trump’s campaign expect him to.
Amid the fallout from the president’s dire performance in Thursday night’s debate, those familiar with Trump’s campaign say it remains focused on Biden as the Democrats’ de facto nominee. Kamala Harris is and will remain Biden’s running mate, they believe. All the panicked chatter among Democrats of her or a swing-state governor replacing Biden atop the ticket is just that: talk.
“It’s a fascinating parlor game. But a lot of it is just mental masturbation,” said a top Republican insider, reflecting the mindset in Trump’s orbit. “Nothing’s changed. He’s the sitting president with 90 percent of the delegates committed. I don’t care if he’s FDR in a fuckin’ wheelchair: He’s still the sitting president.”
Trump world’s stay-the-course approach in the debate aftermath is a rare bit of strategic convergence with Biden’s own operation. The president’s team and allies have tried to downplay his Thursday evening performance even as they acknowledge its unevenness. They’ve vowed to push forward through the calls among fellow party members that Biden leave the race.
Top Trump confidants and Republican operatives in contact with the campaign expect Biden to stay put. They point out that the delegates pledged to Biden essentially belong to the president and no one else. If he doesn’t quit the race, he’ll be the nominee.
What’s more, according to the campaign-finance report the Biden campaign released last week, the president had $91.6 million banked. That money could likely be transferable to Biden’s running mate, Harris. But, Trump’s people say, it could not just be easily handed over to another waiting-in-the-wings presidential candidate, such as Govs. Gretchen Whitmer, Roy Cooper, Andy Beshear, or Gavin Newsom.
On Friday, a top Trump super PAC bashed the idea that Biden could be replaced on the ticket by arguing that the campaign finance laws would make it difficult to transfer money to another nominee.
“The FEC does not make it easy to just transfer and deploy hundreds of millions of dollars to some other candidate—dollars they’d desperately need,” said Taylor Budowich, CEO of MAGA Inc.
Chris Korge, finance chair of the Biden Victory Fund, the re-election campaign’s joint fundraising vehicle, agreed that the money raised by the Biden-Harris ticket was not transferable to another candidate. Regardless, Korge said, it’s “ridiculous” to talk about it because the president won’t quit, and neither will his contributors.
“Donors will never quit on Biden! There is too much at stake. We are trying to save our democracy!” he said in a text message to The Bulwark.
While one Trump adviser said they believed there was “an outside chance” Biden could quit and that “Harris will be the nominee” the expectation was that it wouldn’t happen. Either way, the adviser added, “there are no plans to change the [Trump] campaign. She’s not the head of the Democrat ticket. When or if the time comes and she becomes the head of the ticket, trust me, you’ll know.”
Already, the Trump operation has elevated Harris’s role on the ticket, releasing a TV ad heading into the debate, which portrayed Biden as weak and his vice president “waiting behind him.”
“Vote Joe Biden today and Kamala Harris tomorrow,” the ad’s narrator says as a clip of Harris laughing closes out the spot.
An operative familiar with the campaign’s strategy said the ad was not a sign the Trump campaign was seriously considering that Harris would replace Biden on the ticket. Instead, “it was a hit on Joe Biden. It was to troll Joe. We only planned to run it for the debate. So we rolled the dice that he was gonna mess up and it worked out. Now everyone is talking about getting rid of Biden.”
By midday Friday, in a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, Biden made clear he wasn’t going anywhere. And former president Barack Obama had lent his support.
“Bad debate nights happen,” Obama wrote. “Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. . . . Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.”
The twin comments from Biden and Obama were intended to quell anxiety among Democrats and liberal pundits over the debate. They were also an implicit admission that the open scheming about whether Biden should leave the race or be shoved aside was damaging to the party’s chances in November. On that front, again, Trump’s team is in agreement.
“As far as the [Trump] campaign is concerned, let the Democrats fight about this only to figure out that they really can’t fucking do anything,” another Trump adviser said. “They’re stuck with Joe. You know what that is? That’s a month of fucking reliving how bad that debate was.”
I am so tired of reading how bad Joe's performance was.
If Joe's was bad - trump's was disgraceful.
Joe had a bad night, probably the consequence of several long haul journeys in a few days plus a bad cold. People are commenting on it BECAUSE IT WAS SO UNLIKE HIM.
Trump once again rolled out his litany of lies and idiocy. No one is commenting on it BECAUSE IT WAS WHAT HE ALWAYS DOES.
Every non-MAGA pundit in America had pinned their hopes on Biden having an awesome debate performance and putting the tangerine menace away for all time. They built it up in their heads all week - “oooh! Joe’s at Camp David prepping and Donny’s golfing” etc, etc. And then when Biden did Biden the pundits shit their pants and every one of them wrote, tweeted and podcast their way through their disappointment. Meanwhile, back in America, we saw an old man with a stutter get Gish galloped by a narcissist with a penchant for lying with every utterance.
Pundits have got to start understanding that while they - and we - are steeped in Donald’s crazy on a daily basis, most Americans have had little to no exposure to him over the last 4 years. And the 2 men they saw on that stage reminded them that Donald is a fucking lunatic and that Joe’s old. You can compensate for old. You can’t fix crazy.