Democrats cheer contrast between Biden as president and Trump as defendant

President Biden’s daily intelligence briefing Tuesday coincided with protests outside a Manhattan courthouse over his predecessor. By the time Donald Trump appeared before a judge to face 34 felony counts, Biden was meeting with top science and technology advisers to talk about artificial intelligence in the State Dining Room.

The current president said not a word about Trump all day — ignoring repeated questions from reporters — but Biden’s underlying message was hard to miss: The likely Democratic candidate for president in 2024 was doing his day job, while the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination was getting fingerprinted. The split screen has been implied, without explicit acknowledgment, in nearly everything that Biden does these days.

“How great is it to come to a political rally where we talk about solutions and the future,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said at an event with Biden on Monday in Fridley, Minn., which was technically an official White House event about investments in carbon-neutral energy sources.

Democratic election strategists, while muted in their public responses, have been privately overjoyed with the contrast. Trump’s legal troubles have helped him raise millions for his presidential campaign and boosted his polling in the GOP primary battle, but many Democrats believe the ultimate impact of the legal travails will ultimately damage Trump if he once again wins the Republican nomination.

“The political arithmetic here is that Donald Trump cannot get elected without getting people who didn’t vote for him in 2020 to vote for him in 2024,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster with extensive experience supporting recent presidential bids. “The fact that he is being indicted on one crime and is facing multiple other criminal investigations will make it much harder for him to find new voters.”

White House officials say they are not adjusting their plans to accommodate Trump’s legal issues and that the Monday visit to Minnesota had been planned for weeks. “The president has been doing the country’s business by keeping schedules just like any day of his administration,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said.

Biden’s team has long eyed President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign announcement in April 2011 as a benchmark for their own reelection planning, though they have declined to set a timeline for his formal entry into the race. In recent months, the urgency to meet that date has faded, as fellow Democrats have failed to signal any significant challenge to his nomination.

In planning for the reelection launch, Biden aides say they are balancing competing priorities, according to people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. The earlier the launch, the sooner they can start raising money. But the later the launch, the more time they can keep Biden exclusively in the role of president of the United States.

Biden, himself, still has a host of decisions to make about his campaign structure and organization, and has continued to meet with his senior staff about politics, including this week. Some aides now predict a launch later in the spring or in summer, but caution the plans are in flux.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), one of Biden’s most vocal progressive backers, said there is no rush for the president to announce his reelection campaign.

“He has unified the Democratic Party around his candidacy,” Khanna said. “He can be president and focus on issues the American people care about. There is no better way to run for president than being president.”

In the meantime, Jen O’Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn, two of Biden’s top political advisers at the White House, continue to lead planning efforts, with regular meetings with aides in the White House and the Democratic National Committee as they plot out staffing decisions, organizing tactics and launch preparations. The president is expected to announce his reelection bid via video followed by an official in-person launch event, according to people familiar with the plans.

Senior advisers Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, O’Malley Dillon and Dunn have interviewed candidates for senior roles on the campaign. They include Jenn Ridder, a Biden 2020 campaign alumnus; Emma Brown, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly’s campaign manager; Quentin Fulks, Georgia Sen. Raphael G. Warnock’s campaign manager; White House director of intergovernmental affairs Julie Chavez Rodriguez; Sam Cornale, the executive director of the Democratic National Committee; and Roger Lau, the committee’s deputy executive director. Biden’s team plans to announce a slate of leaders once the campaign launches.

There are still significant headwinds facing another Biden campaign. Fewer than 1 in 3 American voters approve of his handling of the economy, and just 4 in 10 approve of his job performance, according to the latest Gallup polling. The lack of a Democratic challenger, in the meantime, has not led to a clear show of enthusiasm for a final Biden campaign. A Washington Post-ABC poll completed in early February found that 58 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents would prefer someone other than Biden as the nominee.

But Democrats have just emerged from a midterm campaign cycle in which their candidates outperformed expectations in part because of public concern about extreme Republican candidates. They are confident that opposition to the GOP nominee, even if it is not Trump, will unify the party behind the president.

“We are going to have a Republican nominee and we are going to run against that person. And there is going to be a sharp contrast,” a Biden adviser said. “Anyone who gets through the Republican primary will have to have moved to the right.”

At the same time, Democrats have begun to see evidence that the big statewide wins in key swing states in 2022 were not isolated incidents. Internal tracking polls in Pennsylvania and Michigan remain strong, Democratic officials say, and Tuesday’s Democratic victory of Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election showed evidence that concern over abortion access continues to reshape the electorate.

Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as well as the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection “created a fundamental shift in politics that won’t recede until the GOP deradicalizes on abortion and democracy.”

“The Wisconsin Supreme Court results show that Republican attacks on reproductive freedom and the Constitution are just powerful and politically potent as they were in the fall of 2022 and are likely to remain so in 2024,” he said.

At the same time, Trump is enjoying a resurgence inside the Republican Party, with polling showing his strength continuing to grow over the past few months even as the broader American public continues to harbor significant concerns. A recent CNN poll found that 6 in 10 Americans approve of the indictment of Trump, compared with just 21 percent of Republicans. A Quinnipiac University poll last week found 57 percent of Americans believe Trump should be disqualified from another presidential run if he is indicted. There is no legal prohibition against accused or convicted criminals running for president.

With rare exception, Trump’s rivals within the Republican Party have reacted to his indictment by attacking the prosecutor and dismissing the charges as politically motivated.

“The Republican reaction to criminal indictments — much like their reaction to MAGA’s violent insurrection — makes it most likely that the party will implode in the coming years,” said Navin Nayak, the president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which has been researching Democratic messaging for the coming campaign.

At the White House briefing on Tuesday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeatedly refused any comment on Trump’s arraignment in a Manhattan courtroom.

She also passed on a question about whether Biden would consider a pardon of Trump. A reporter then asked why the president would not comment on the Trump arraignment, when Biden had commented on the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol during legal proceedings against the alleged assailants.

“It was a different moment in a different time,” Jean-Pierre said. “When it comes to these cases, these criminal specific cases, we are just not going to comment.”