Without his signature MAGA (Make America Great Again) political rallies during the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. President Donald Trump has used White House and other events as backdrops to deliver his reelection pitch and launch verbal attacks on his presumptive 2020 rival, Joe Biden.
This week alone, the Republican president turned a White House Rose Garden press conference on presidential actions to punish China into an hour-long multi-pronged attack on Biden. During a White House discussion on crime prevention, he alleged that Biden wants “open borders” to allow entry to the international criminal gang MS-13. Separately, during an event in Atlanta on infrastructure, Trump accused the former Democratic vice president of aiming to “tie up projects in red tape.”
The Biden campaign responded by tweeting the candidate’s plan on infrastructure and releasing a fact check on "Donald Trump’s Record of Putting China First."
In the absence of Trump rallies, the president’s executive orders, roundtable discussions and other initiatives have become de facto campaign events. This harnessing of the power of the American presidency and the reflected grandeur of the White House to elevate an incumbent’s achievements in an election year is known as the “Rose Garden Strategy.” The term refers to the garden outside of the Oval Office usually reserved for presidential ceremonies and public statements.
Taking it to the next level
The majority of past incumbents have employed the Rose Garden strategy to some degree in an election year, but analysts say that Trump has taken it to a new level.
“If you use a press conference that's supposed to be about an official announcement about Hong Kong, and instead take 90 percent of the time to attack your political opponent - that's not the way things have been done in the past by previous presidents,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the non-profit American Enterprise Institute.
Vanderbilt University presidential historian Thomas Schwartz said that Trump’s Rose Garden strategy is stylistically so different than that of past presidents that it's “jarring.” “It doesn't seem to fit into past presidents’ manners of doing it,” he added.
In 2016, Trump ran on a platform to “drain the swamp” and “shake things up,” and he has since repeatedly broken with presidential norms, from refusing to release his tax returns and set aside business interests, to denouncing judicial decisions he doesn’t agree with. Trump’s allies have praised the president’s blunt, less filtered communication style as “telling it as it is” and defended his instincts to “punch back” on opponents.
“The vast majority of Americans loved the way that he actually talked about some of the policy differences that were outlined actually in Joe Biden’s policy speech,” White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told reporters on Wednesday.
Meadows characterized the speech as the president’s attempt to highlight policy differences. “Normally you would call that a legitimate debate,” he added.
Less is more
Meanwhile, Biden is taking a “less is more” approach, mostly staying in his home in Delaware, limiting campaign travels and news conferences.
By limiting their candidate’s exposure, analysts say the Biden campaign is essentially outsourcing its work to a president whose short temper and off-the-cuff remarks often open him up to criticism.
Trump rarely stays on message, said Thomas Schwartz. “He has frequently stumbled into errors and into saying things that can be used very effectively against him.”
The strategy has proven effective for Biden who is currently leading in several polls nationally and key battleground states, with a recent one from Quinnipiac University showing registered voters in the country backing Biden over Trump 52% to 37%.
“If you're the challenger, you want to keep it that way, and the best way to keep it that way is to stay out of it,” said Norman Ornstein. “Make the focus be on a wounded, floundering president and on policies that Americans are not happy with, and not on you.”
In a statement to VOA, Deputy National Press Secretary of the Trump Campaign Samantha Zager said, "Joe Biden's cynical campaign is operating as though voters don’t deserve to know where he stands on the issues, and that’s deeply insulting to the American public. Any time Biden is left to his own devices to defend his nearly half century in office, he proves just how unfit he is to leave his basement, let alone lead a nation.”
Focus on pandemic
Biden’s less-is-more approach also aims to draw attention to Trump’s mixed messaging on the pandemic, which critics have pinned as a contributing factor in the administration’s failure to keep coronavirus cases down. By mid-July, the nation’s cases, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, surpassed 3.4 million with deaths approaching 136,000, with 60,000 new cases daily.
“Staying in Delaware, moving out only very cautiously, always wearing a mask in public, those are things that are designed not only to do the right thing, but to draw that contrast with Donald Trump,” said Ornstein.
The Biden campaign has run a number of ads pointing to Trump’s failure in handling the pandemic. Biden himself has accused the president of endangering Americans with his rallies while acknowledging the merits of his own limited exposure strategy.
“The more that Donald Trump is out, the worse he does. I think it is wonderful that he goes out,” Biden said at a virtual event for Asian American and Pacific Islander voters last month. “I’m being a bit facetious because it is dangerous what he is doing at his rallies. But look at it, his numbers have dropped through the floor,” he added.
Still, the longer Biden keeps his low profile, the more successful Trump and his allies might be in portraying the 77-year-old former vice president as afraid, weak, and senile.
"Here's a guy that doesn't talk. Nobody hears him and whenever he does talk, he can't put two sentences together," Trump said at a June FOX News town hall.
Pro-Trump television ads have compiled Biden’s gaffes and moments where he stumbled over his words, asking if Biden “has dementia.”
The president’s broadside on Biden’s mental acuity has “planted a seed,” said Thomas Schwartz, pointing to public opinion polls where people have expressed concerns on Biden's mental fitness, but added it’s not necessarily a winning strategy. “You can do a greatest hits of Joe Biden stumbling, but I don't think that's having quite the impact he hoped it would have,” Schwartz added.
Post-conventions
Pandemics aside, the U.S. presidential election season will kick into higher gear after both Democrats and Republicans hold their party conventions in August to formally nominate Biden and Trump respectively. After that point, the campaigns will be less able to hide behind the relative safety of their respective strategies and the candidates will have to engage in more intense debates when they meet on stage.
A lot of research shows that there's more opportunity for voters to have new opinions about Joe Biden that could be positive or negative, said John Fortier, research Fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Joe Biden may find he's under more scrutiny as he is more in the public light and when he has to debate Donald Trump,” he said.
The Biden campaign has rejected the Trump campaign’s push for additional and earlier debates and said they will participate in three debates beginning in September, as is the norm in the American election cycle.
Taking aim at the president’s previous comments describing himself, in an interview with WBRE-TV last week, Biden said he “can hardly wait” to debate Trump.
“I can hardly wait,” Biden said. “I can hardly wait to deal with what he refers to himself as — a stable genius.”
