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Campaign notebook
The former president has set the bar low for President Biden’s functionality in next week’s game. He now supports the option of Biden deleting it.
By Shawn McCreesh
Reporting from Racine, Wisconsin.
Minutes after beginning his speech at a military rally on Tuesday, Donald J. Trump asked a question to the thousands of people who came to hear him speak: “Are you going to watch the debate?”
Trump in Racine, Wisconsin, but it’s clear that his brain is in Atlanta, the site of his showdown with President Biden next week. He continually pondered possible scenarios, lowering expectations that he would dominate Biden, then, as if he could. He didn’t help himself, expanding them again.
The expectation game is a specific challenge for the Trump campaign. Trump, 78, has spent months portraying Biden, 81, as the envelope of a guy who can walk lightly or utter full sentences. Republicans released a series of videos of Biden walking stiffly, some deceptively uphill, intended to be proof of Mr. Biden.
Trump’s supporters at Racine have shown that they are marinating themselves on this content. ” Biden can’t stand!”She was next to another woman wearing a T-shirt with an image of Mr. Biden that read, “Accuse me. I may not remember. “
But Trump, who is also gearing up for his caricature of Biden, will run out of steam next week. He brazenly wrestled with the apparent question: What if Biden crossed the very low bar Trump has now set for him?
He had answers: If this were to happen, it would only be because Biden would be “encouraged,” he told supporters, suggesting that the president would absorb a bunch of cocaine first, since the narcotic was recently discovered in the White House. For the secret service, investigators have never been able to discover how he was delivered there and he is not similar to the president or any member of his family. (It was an incredibly sharp idea, though, that came a week after the Delaware trial that made Hunter Biden’s first family’s struggle with addiction public. )
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