Former Vice President Joe Biden was long seen as the most "electable" candidate in the Democratic primary field. This view drew much criticism, with many on the left arguing that he was more vulnerable than he appeared. But now that the race against President Donald Trump is in full swing, Biden appears to only be gaining in strength — and Trump is clearly getting nervous.
According to The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, one of the main problems for Trump is the fact that Biden is an older white male — so the president cannot use racism or sexism against his opponent. These were Trump's go-to tools to attack Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama, but they're useless against Biden.
“For the past few months,” Serwer explains, “Trump and the conservative propaganda apparatus have struggled to make the old race-and-gender-baiting rhetoric stick to Biden. But voters don’t appear to believe that Biden is an avatar of the ‘radical left.’ They don’t think Biden is going to lock up your manhood in a ‘testicle lockbox.’ They don’t buy that Biden’s platform, which is well to the left of the ticket he joined in 2008, represents a quiet adherence to ‘Kenyan anti-colonialism.’”
The fact that Trump, in 2019, asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden shows how much Trump feared the possibility of running against the former vice president — and now, going up against a centrist Catholic from blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania in the general election is a reality for the president.
David Axelrod, who served as a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, made a similar point about Trump’s fear of Biden in an op-ed for CNN’s titled: "Joe Biden frightens Donald Trump."
“Joe Biden is culturally inconvenient for Trump’s reelection project," he wrote. "An older, white, Irish Catholic from a working class Pennsylvania family, Biden is just not frightening enough to the voters Trump needs to scare.”
Axelrod adds: “Trump has recognized this from the start. It’s why he leaned so hard on the president of Ukraine last summer to open a baseless investigation into Biden and his son Hunter’s board membership of a Ukrainian energy company. Now, Trump has the matchup he hoped to avoid.”
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