President Trump wants to brand Joe Biden as a doddering gaffe machine. But the incumbent’s own rhetoric causes so much controversy it is overwhelming the strategy.
Welcome to our weekly analysis of the state of the 2020 campaign. If President Trump and his allies wanted to cast Joe Biden as an error-prone politician of yesteryear, this week they got some help. Mr. Biden’s interview with a slew of Black and Latino journalists produced two clippable comments for Republicans: At one point, Mr. Biden got testy with a reporter who asked him about taking a mental aptitude test, suggesting the reporter should be tested for cocaine and asking, “Are you a junkie?” At another stage of the interview, Mr. Biden contrasted Black and Latino communities by saying the latter had more diversity. But both comments, and Mr. Biden’s eventual attempt to walk back his remarks about Black diversity, were overshadowed by Mr. Trump’s own statements, a consequence of the president’s lack of discipline in executing his own campaign strategy. Mr. Trump’s charge that Mr. Biden, a practicing Catholic, was “against God” drew ire from across the political spectrum and supplanted Mr. Biden’s comments in the news cycle. It was a microcosm of Mr. Trump’s current political struggle: He succeeded in 2016 as advisers “let Trump be Trump.” Now, he can’t seem to stand down, even when it would be helpful to let Biden be Biden.
