SCRANTON, Pa. — Donald Trump can’t stop running against President Joe Biden.
At a campaign event in the president’s boyhood hometown Wednesday, Trump mentioned their June 27 debate, questioned his former opponent’s mental competence and misleadingly characterized Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic nominee as a “coup.”
Trump has spent weeks trying to tie Harris, who holds a narrow lead in national polling, to Biden, who trailed Trump in polls. But his comments about Biden often have focused narrowly on his account of the president’s flaws and his own frustrations with the Democratic switch. And in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, the allure of Biden-bashing appeared to be fading with some of the Trump faithful.
Now that Harris is her party’s standard-bearer, Trump mentions her nearly three times as frequently as he drops Biden’s name, according to a Washington Post analysis of his public speeches. But Trump still has mentioned his onetime opponent — who has otherwise been all but absent from the campaign trail — over 500 times in 46 public speeches tracked by The Post since Harris became the nominee. Trump clearly sees political gain in mentioning his former opponent: recent polling shows that the majority of voters believe the country is on the wrong track.
Trump kept up the habit Wednesday in this Pennsylvania city Biden has made central to his political identity. Less than 10 minutes into his speech, Trump began to talk about “Sleepy Joe.”
In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly suggested that Democrats were wrong to ditch Biden for Harris.
“Joe’s looking pretty good lately, I tell you, he’s looking pretty good compared to Kamala,” Trump, who spent months calling Biden incompetent to serve as president, said in Scranton on Wednesday.
He proceeded to offer his own version of why Biden decided to not seek reelection, baselessly claiming that Biden was “angry” at Harris and describing his replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket as an “overthrow.”
“They said, ‘You’re sick, you’re not going to go on, ’” Trump said, adding, “This was the first coup in the history of America.”
It was within the Democratic Party’s powers to replace Biden with Harris. Though primary voters chose Biden, they technically elected a slate of delegates to choose their nominee. After Biden dropped out, those delegates were free to pick a replacement, and they almost unanimously selected Harris.
Biden stepped aside in July, after weeks of pressure from Democrats who warned he had no path to victory after his disastrous debate performance against Trump, in which Biden appeared at times to lose his train of thought.
Trump has both publicly and privately lamented Harris’s ascension, even as he has also tried to portray her as an easier opponent to beat. (The Post polling average has Harris leading Trump in four of the seven battleground states.) He has complained about the amount of money and resources his campaign poured into beating Biden ($150 million, he says) only to have to start over with Harris. At a recent rally in Erie, Pa., Trump even suggested without evidence that Democrats might bring Biden back as their nominee.
In Pennsylvania, where Trump was scheduled to appear at a second campaign event Wednesday evening, Harris is leading in polls by three points, according to The Post’s polling average. The state is critical to both Harris’s and Trump’s paths to the White House.
Outside the venue, the anti-Biden merchandise was sparser than it once was. But it was still there. Vendors sold magnets with profane jabs at Biden: “FJB,” “Let’s go, Brandon” and an image of Biden in a chef’s hat accompanied by a message with an expletive.
Attendees said they agreed with Trump’s pique at Democrats’ last-minute move to replace Biden. “What happened with Joe Biden dropping out … is the opposite of democracy,” said Rob Neishman, 49, who described himself as a onetime Democrat, adding that he and his family grew alienated from the party around the same time Trump crashed into the political scene.
He brushed off suggestions that Harris’s ascension had made Trump’s path to reelection harder.
For Marvin Batista, a 36-year-old correctional officer from Reading, Pa., who showed up for Trump’s rally there Wednesday evening, the election represents a choice between Trump and Biden administration politics.
“In 2024, you get to choose. You got to live four years of Kamala and Biden, and you got to live four years of Trump,” he said. “Obviously you were better off four years ago.”
Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.