President Donald Trump wasted no time attacking his presumptive opponent in the 2020 presidential election, taunting former Vice President Joe Biden over former President Barack Obama’s failure to endorse his one-time right-hand man.
“I don’t know why President Obama hasn’t supported Joe Biden a long time ago,” Trump told during his daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday afternoon.
“He feels something is wrong,” Trump speculated. “It does amaze me that President Obama hasn’t supported Sleepy Joe. It just hasn’t happened. When’s it gonna happen? Why isn’t he? He knows something that you don’t know, that I think I know, that you don’t know.”
Later on, Trump suggested that Obama would come out and endorse his former running mate before the general election, but that Obama was laying low until the nomination is finalized.
Obama will “come out at some point,” Trump told reporters. “He certainly does not want to see me for four more years.”
NBC News notes that Obama has said, previously, that he would withhold his official endorsement until the Democratic Party had crowned a 2020 presidential candidate, but many experts speculate that Obama has been aggressive in directing the party behind the scenes.
Early on in the 2020 nomination contest, reports surfaced that Obama was warning Democrats away from nominating Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), concerned that the nation at large would reject Sanders’ socialist policies as too extreme. The former president even reportedly told a group of donors that he would step in personally if it looked like Sanders was going to snag the nod.
In the days following Sanders’ decisive win in the Nevada caucuses, Obama’s machine reportedly roared into action, directing prominent Democrats towards his former Vice President and orchestrating key endorsements, but the former president kept his influence out of the headlines.
As for Joe Biden, he has not, in fact, earned Obama’s endorsement — a problem that Biden has been trying to explain away from the beginning. Although the former president has made lukewarm statements of support on Biden’s behalf, Biden’s team has said that Obama wants his former Veep to “earn” the nomination on his own.
Regardless, Democrats are now “salivating” at the prospect of Obama jumping off the sidelines, according to the Hill.
“Sources say the former president is ready but that he and Biden are also conscious of the coronavirus pandemic dominating the country and changing the nature of politics,” the outlet reported Thursday, adding that a source close to Obama says he’s ‘eager to go,” and that Obama’s “been waiting for this election for almost four years.”
That’s good news for Biden, because Democrats believe Obama may be the only chance Biden has at projecting any air of competence.
“Seeing Obama on the campaign trail should excite voters who’ve longed to see him weigh in on current issues and give Biden the needed push,” one Democratic strategist told the Hill. “Obama would also remind voters of his competence while in office, creating a strong contrast between Trump and the Democratic alternative.”
The Trump campaign seems prepared for that eventuality. Their tactic on Biden has been to question his fitness for office — a characterization Biden often substantiates with his questionable media appearances.