In any contest, from battle to political campaigns, there is one hard and fast rule: Never attempt to fight the enemy on the ground of his choosing. The Biden reelection campaign is obviously ignoring this admonition, as on Saturday they appeared to play Trump’s nickname game by dubbing the former president “Broke Don.”
If you’re going to play this game, it’s best to at least attempt to be creative. “Broke Don?” Seriously? That’s just a pedestrian effort.
President Biden’s reelection campaign has dubbed former President Trump “Broke Don,” taking a strategy out of Trump’s playbook that his political rivals know all too well.
Trump has used nicknames — from “Little Marco” to “Crooked Hillary” to “Lyin’ Ted” — to put down a variety of opponents. For much of 2020, Biden’s moniker, courtesy of Trump, was “Sleepy Joe.”
Now, the Biden team is seeking to turn the tables in attempting to make one stick to Trump while it worked this week to highlight the former president’s lagging fundraising numbers in the 2024 race.
This is likely to backfire on the Biden team for a couple of reasons:
First, the former president’s legal troubles are broadly seen as illegitimate lawfare perpetrated on him by activist attorneys general and judges, and not without reason; many Americans, including independents and moderates, are more than a little perturbed at the idea that an American politician, even a former president, and current presidential candidate, can be attacked like this.
Second, let’s be honest: this is Trump’s ground. When it comes to making up nicknames with which to attack an opponent, Trump is the king. You can’t out-insult him. You can’t out-punch him, not in this field of discourse. He invented the game, he defined it, and if “Broke Don” is any indication, the Biden team isn’t even approaching a level of adequacy, much less showing any inkling that they may one day be able to take Trump on.
And that’s bad, because the Biden reelection campaign can’t really run on the president’s record, and now (it’s early, but still) things are looking pretty bad for the befuddled incumbent. The Biden people even brought Barack Obama out of retirement to try to save the president’s campaign, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to work very well.
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Some Democrats get it:
“The Biden team’s instinct to earn free media, try to get under his skin, and go on offense is the right one. But mimicking Trump has been done before and has never really worked,” one Democratic strategist said.
“You can’t out-Trump Trump because he’s the original version. I would say they need to be more creative in producing their own original and unique strategy to bring him down a peg that shocks and awes,” the strategist added.
I repeat: Never attempt to fight the enemy on the ground of his own choosing. For the Trump campaign, another saying common in military circles applies: When your enemy is making a mistake, let him. That’s the best tactic the Trump team can pull right now, and nobody in modern politics is better than Donald Trump at this game: Being creatively insulting.
Oh, the Biden campaign will try everything they can, from insults to lawfare, even though it seems like every effort just bumps Trump’s poll ratings up. Donald Trump is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the 2024 election. Every blow they land on him just makes him stronger. This won’t be any different.
