While Joe Biden has been entrenched in a week from hell with deafening calls for him to bow out of the 2024 election, his opponent, the infamously foul-mouthed and unfiltered Donald Trump, has kept a shockingly low profile.
It’s a significant step back from the norm for Trump, who’s known to unleash relentless attacks on his political rivals, including Biden, at any given opportunity.
Yet, while Biden, 81, is battling the lowest moment of his presidency, Trump has resorted to nothing more than a few critical statements on Truth Social—posts that were, for the most part, tame by the ex-president’s standards.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Trump, 78, hadn’t spoken on camera since debate night last Thursday, and hadn’t called in to right-wing cable networks to weigh in on whether he thought Biden should be his opponent or not. Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, did not respond to a question asking who Trump would prefer to face in November.
Instead, Trump appears content to watch Biden’s team scramble and top Dems bicker about what Biden’s future should be—playing on the old adage, “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.”
While Trump has let the media attention swirl almost exclusively around Biden, he hasn’t gone without taking a few muted shots at Biden’s disastrous debate performance.
Most notably, he posted to Truth Social on Monday that Biden’s “mind and memory” were “completely shot.”
“Biden’s Debate performance was rated poor, with an arrow pointing left. That means it was Less than Poor,” he wrote. “Mine was rated, ‘the best in the history of Presidential Debates.’ In other words, there is a BIG GAP for Crooked Joe to make up, and with his mind and memory completely shot, and marbles in his mouth, it’s not going to happen!”
In a separate post about the debate, he added Monday morning that Biden “choked like a dog” and was a “cognitive mess.” Those were Trump’s harshest words for Biden, though.
By Wednesday afternoon, he had shifted his focus on Truth Social to bashing the special prosecutor Jack Smith, sharing campaign ads, and posting graphics that apparently showed him out-polling and out-fundraising Biden. He’s made no mention of Biden bowing out or the slew of lies he rattled off at the debate.
Meanwhile, in the White House, things took a chaotic turn on Tuesday after top Democrats began questioning if Biden could realistically last another four years in the Oval Office.
That included Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who said both Biden and Trump’s mental fitness were now a “legitimate question,” and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), who outright called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race.
Democratic governors from across the country were flown to Washington to meet with Biden on Wednesday. An “all-staff” meeting was also called by Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, and a report from The New York Times claimed that Biden told a “key ally” he was considering dropping out—a report that the White House vehemently denied.
All the while, Trump has remained uncharacteristically mum in the background—perhaps by design.