The biggest news story in the US this week was Donald Trump’s unprecedented appearance at the defendant’s table in a Manhattan courtroom – an event that Joe Biden took pains to appear blissfully unaware of.
On the day Trump learned he was facing 34 charges related to falsifying business records in the first-ever indictment of a former American president, Biden spent his day talking on the phone with the French leader, Emmanuel Macron, and Britain’s King Charles III, and presided over a meeting with his science and technology advisers at the White House. And, despite the best efforts of the reporters who follow him around on a daily basis, he ignored all questions about the allegations made by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg.
“Look, our focus is going to continue to be the American people. What you all cover is up to all of you, but we’re going to do our best to stay the course, to talk about the issues that matter,” the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Wednesday when asked why the indictment appeared to be a verboten subject at the White House.
Observers of Biden’s administration say the strategy is probably a wise one as he heads into a potential rematch next year against Trump, the Republican opponent he bested in the 2020 election. Despite several legislative wins, Biden’s approval ratings have been underwater for months, and CNN on Thursday released a survey that found a majority of Democrats would prefer someone else as their nominee for president in next year’s election.
“I think that is sort of the intentional thing. I think they want to keep their distance from what they see as the chaos and divisiveness that Donald Trump creates,” said Navin Nayak, executive director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a former Democratic campaign staffer.
This strategy also gives Biden the opportunity to cast Trump as scandal-plagued and unfit for office, and himself as the competent alternative – a tactic he deployed to defeat him in 2020.
Biden has yet to say whether he’ll run for a second term, though people close to him have repeatedly said he will. “He says he’s not done,” the first lady, Jill Biden, said in February. Reports from earlier this year indicated the president would announce his re-election campaign sometime after his February State of the Union address – a date that has come and gone. Trump’s prosecution could be one reason for the delay.
“Why compete with that?” said the Democratic pollster Carly Cooperman. “I don’t see any reason right now for him to announce that he’s running. He’s already the president, and there’s gonna be all this attention on Trump and his legal battles, at least in the short term. And so I think it’s definitely a reason to push that back a little bit, at minimum.”
The former president’s Tuesday appearance at the criminal court in Manhattan was covered by hundreds of journalists, some of whom waited overnight to be in the courtroom when details of the indictment centered on facilitating hush money payments and running a “catch and kill” scheme to suppress negative news stories ahead of the 2016 election were relayed to a scowling Trump.
Trump could also soon find himself summoned to courtrooms elsewhere in the US. Fani Willis, the district attorney in the Atlanta-area Fulton county, is investigating Trump and his allies’ failed effort to overturn Biden’s election win in Georgia. In Washington DC, special prosecutor Jack Smith is in the middle of an inquiry into three sources of legal peril for the former president: the classified documents the FBI discovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, his election meddling and the January 6 insurrection.
As serious as the allegations in Bragg’s case are – no current or former American president has ever been indicted – Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the White House may view it as the sort of scandal Biden should stay away from.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if his team just sees that as almost below the president or not what the president should focus on,” he said. But if Trump were to be charged over the January 6 insurrection or his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, subjects Biden has spoken out against forcefully in the past, that might change the president’s tone.
“That’s something where you need the president to be out front. Even if it doesn’t persuade a lot of people, that still is part of the president’s role, to defend the constitutional order,” Schickler said.
While Biden may have kept his thoughts about the Manhattan case to himself, Cooperman said the indictment is to the president’s benefit, in part because it serves as a distraction for the discontented public.
“By saying nothing, Biden is kind of saying everything,” Cooperman said. “Even if this might help Trump win his own party’s presidential [nomination], I think that from Biden’s perspective, less is more, and being able to say nothing and let that play out is the best thing that he could be doing.”
