Trump was in Racine,Wisconsin,on Tuesday (US time) but it was clear his mind was in Atlanta,the site of his match-up against US President Joe Biden next week. He repeatedly mused about the potential scenarios,lowering expectations that he would dominate Biden and then,as if he couldn’t help himself,raising them again.
Donald Trump during his campaign rally in Racine,Wisconsin,this week.The New York Times
The expectation game is a particular challenge for the Trump campaign. Trump,78,has spent months casting the 81-year-old Biden as a husk of a man who can barely walk or formulate complete sentences. Republicans have pumped out a stream of videos of Biden walking stiffly – some deceptively edited – that are meant to be proof of Biden’s decline.
Trump’s supporters in Racine showed they have been marinating in this content. “Biden can’t stand up!” one woman yelled during Trump’s speech. She stood near another woman who wore a T-shirt with a picture of Biden that read:“Impeach me. I won’t remember.”
But Trump was also preparing for his caricature of Biden to be punctured next week. He openly wrestled with the obvious question:what if Biden clears the very low bar that Trump has set for him?
He had answers:If that should happen,it’s only because Biden will be “pumped up”,he told his followers,suggesting that the president would hoover up a pile of cocaine beforehand. The narcotic was recently found in the White House by the Secret Service, and it was not linked to the president or anyone in his family. (Still,it was an acutely cutting notion,coming a week after the Delaware trial that publicly aired the first family’s struggle with Hunter Biden’s addiction.)
President Joe Biden has flown to be with his son,hours after Hunter Biden was convicted of federal gun charges.
Trump also told his followers to be suspicious of the whole debate enterprise,although his campaign negotiated the terms of his participation. They should keep in mind,he said,that he’ll be up against multiple adversaries at once – not just Biden but both of CNN’s moderators,Jake Tapper and Dana Bash,who,Trump added,were constitutionally incapable of treating him fairly. “I’ll be debating three people instead of one half of a person,” he said.
While it’s clear Biden has physically slowed and his gait stiffened in recent years, called him “fit for duty”. Trump has not disclosed a detailed summary of his health. Neither man has released a comprehensive assessment of their mental fitness.
Lately,Trump has been experiencing his own adventures in ageing for all to see. Last week,he bragged about passing a cognitive test when he was president but mixed up the name of the doctor who’d administered it. He has confused Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley,and Biden with Barack Obama.
And so Democrats have their own set of video clips they’ve been consuming,too – seeing evidence of ageing in Trump’s curious tangents about sharks and boats with electric batteries,or in the way he confuses words,as he did at the rally on Tuesday,when he barked at the Biden campaign for saying that “the videos of crooked Joe shuffling are clean fakes”.
He asked the crowd,“Do you know what a clean fake is?” The term Trump was reaching for is actually “cheap fake” – real footage that has been edited deceptively,omitting context by zooming in or cropping out.
In Racine,some of Trump’s supporters took a more nuanced view of the videos of Biden,the age factor and how it all played into expectations for the debate.
“Oh,absolutely,we see them on every channel,and all over the internet of course,” Marjean Stern,79,a retiree,said of the videos of Biden. But,given her own age,she confessed to feeling a little queasy at how her candidate has revelled in Biden’s seemingly senior moments.
“We’re elderly,so we don’t like that,” she said. “I don’t want to make fun of him.”
US President Joe Biden has come across as wooden at times in recent appearances.AP
Will Moes,23,who just graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and will be voting for the first time in a presidential election,said he accepted that videos of Biden might be edited to make him look addled. “But a lot of the context you see them in,when you watch the full videos,it’s hard to fake that,” he said.
Moes saw Trump’s verbal mistakes as the foreseeable gaffes of a garrulous candidate,not as signs of ageing. And as he looked ahead at the debate next week,he echoed Trump’s scepticism that the two candidates would be judged fairly.
As long as Biden “stands up there and doesn’t pass out and doesn’t stop talking for two minutes,the liberal media is going to paint him as a winner,no matter what happens,which is the scary part,” he said.
Trump spoke for a little more than an hour on Tuesday in the early summer heat,Lake Michigan glistening behind him as he recounted how he’d won the state in 2016 before losing it in 2020.
“Look at that beautiful lake,” he said,digressing. “What’s better,this,or sitting on the Pacific or Atlantic,which has sharks?” he asked.
“You don’t have sharks. That’s a big advantage. I’ll take the one without the sharks.”
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