Paul Waldman: “President Trump counts on getting voters to nurture and express their ugliest feelings. Yet so far, in one of the most important but underappreciated developments of the 2020 presidential campaign, he seems to have completely failed at persuading Republican voters to truly despise Joe Biden.”
“They certainly don’t like Biden. But they don’t detest him with the kind of burning fire that Hillary Clinton inspired in them four years ago. And that’s a serious problem for a president who depends on anger and hatred to motivate his supporters.”
“When Trump held a news conference Tuesday and blathered on for nearly an hour, mentioning Biden no fewer than 31 times (among other things, he claimed Biden would ‘abolish the suburbs’), it may have been because aides have urged him to talk more about the presumptive Democratic nominee. Their theory, no doubt accurate, is that if the election is just about the president, he’ll lose.”