Joe Scarborough, the host of the MSNBC show The Morning Joe, recently regaled his adoring fans with an unhinged screaming rant, this time chastising White House Aides who are shaping President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign strategy.
In decibels that made dogs howl across the nation, Scarborough screamed:
“Whoever inside the White House is telling Joe Biden not to attack Donald Trump, stop it! Seriously, stop it, all right?”
He went on to add, “You’re costing the President. You really are. You’re costing him points.”
In August, the Biden campaign announced a $7 million TV ad buy, focusing on the president’s alleged “bipartisan achievements” in office and attempting to frame the bumbling leader as a “man next door” by highlighting his ever-changing Scranton, Pennsylvania roots.
Notably missing in his ads is a focused attack on former president and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.
The president’s TV reelection messaging focuses on Biden’s image rather than a direct attack on Trump, and it’s a strategy that is failing miserably. Some Democrats are advising the team to shift gears and change the campaign from one of positive messaging to a mud-slinging free-for-all directed at Trump.
It’s hard to imagine calls for even more Trump bashing in a world where news outlets spend an unprecedented 93% of their time shredding the former president and only 7% of their efforts covering other, more pressing news stories. The Media Research Center (MRC) uncovered these astonishing statistics, proving yet another conservative “conspiracy theory” to be true. The mainstream media is firmly in the liberals’ back pockets.
It would seem that lying about Trump’s “threat” to Democracy, gaslighting Americans to believe they were not thriving under a Trump economy, and manufacturing numerous criminal charges against the former president aren’t enough to tip the scales in Biden’s favor. Trump still leads Biden in a hypothetical match-up nationwide and, especially problematic for Biden, in all swing states.
The recent polling results have confounded Democrat commentators, who continue to reach for a way to drum up support for their wildly unpopular candidate. Biden speechwriter and regular Morning Joe guest Jon Meacham suggested that voters face a “test of citizenship” and that Americans must prove themselves to Biden. “I don’t think Biden is on trial here. I think we (American citizens) are.” He suggested that to prove good citizenship, voters needed to turn out for Biden to show “empathy” for the challenges he is facing, such as a global crisis in Ukraine.
Meacham went on to claim, as Democrats do, that if voters do not cast an empathetic vote for Biden, they will be enabling an “authoritarian” who will end Democracy as we know it.
Scarborough isn’t alone in losing his mind over the Biden campaign’s messaging approach. Recent polling results drove former Obama advisor David Axelrod to wonder if Biden is the right candidate for 2024, comments that he was later forced to walk back. An anonymous Biden donor acknowledged that the campaign seriously miscalculated the theory that once voters “understood the president’s accomplishments,” his ratings would improve. They observed that many Biden supporters are angry that the campaign has, so far, neglected to attack Trump more aggressively.
Another donor suggests that Biden is facing “too much criticism.” Still, another believes that Biden doesn’t have enough surrogates (endorsers), even though key figures across America, from Hollywood celebrities to millionaires, have thrown their support behind the struggling president.
Biden aides lament that global crises cloud the president’s attempts to boast about his “accomplishments.” And no Democrat argument would be complete without the eternal wisdom of Reverend Al Sharpton, who emphasizes Trump’s legal battles while ignoring Biden’s own emerging corruption scandals.
Scarborough can scream at the camera all he wants, but Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said there are currently no proposed changes to the president’s advertising strategy. Campaign officials explain that the approach has always been to reintroduce the president to voters, emphasize his accomplishments, and prepare to target the GOP nominee in the future. They have continued to criticize Trump through other means like earned media and surrogate operations, and they maintain their focus on highlighting the president’s achievements.
The Biden campaign is relying on Trump’s rivals to smear the president, but so far, the former president’s GOP challengers have failed to make a dent in his popularity. He has sailed through the primary while Biden’s poll numbers stubbornly refused to budge.
The media’s constant assault on Trump is not giving Biden the edge he needs, and Biden’s platform of his administration’s accomplishments is not pushing the needle for him. Scarborough is right to be concerned. But it’s unlikely that a Biden-style campaign assassination attempt will make any difference at all.
The persistent pain of Biden’s “accomplishments” on Americans speaks for itself.
