WASHINGTON – Thursday night in Chicago belonged to Kamala Harris, but the vice president’s triumphal and combative acceptance speech had one underlying source: Joe Biden.
President Biden wasn’t to be seen at the United Center on the last night of the Democratic National Convention while the balloons dropped on a beaming Harris, her slim polling lead widened and Donald Trump fumed on social media.
Still, Biden’s fingerprints were everywhere, taunting a GOP that thought it finally had him beat.
It was only weeks ago that a surging Republican Party appeared to have, at last, trapped Biden. He had emerged mostly unscathed through a Trump White House effort to crush his 2020 candidacy, a fizzled GOP impeachment investigation, and a special counsel probe into his handling of classified documents.
Then, wounded by his dismal, wandering June debate with Trump, Biden managed to vex his opponents one last time by throwing a late-in-the game lateral to Harris last month when the GOP was already celebrating in the end zone.
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“They are incapacitated,” said Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee. The GOP “doesn’t have the head space to adjust to Kamala Harris because Donald Trump is the head of the Republican Party.”
After six years as Trump’s near-obsession, Biden – through Harris’ rocketing campaign – may have again come out on top, some observers say.
“The tide has certainly turned here in Michigan, where Trump had been rolling with a six to seven point lead over Biden a month ago, and now trails by a handful,” said former U.S. representative Fred Upton, a Republican who retired last year after more than three decades in the House. “The enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz ticket has been contagious across the board, as Trump has not changed his message and now finds it difficult to alter his course.”
Hunting Biden
Trump has been fixated on Biden for years.
Biden was a centrist former vice president when he launched what would be his final run for president in April 2019. Polls identified “Joe from Scranton” as then-President Trump’s biggest threat.
In a July 25, 2019, Oval Office call about U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Trump asked the newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to “do us favor” by announcing a criminal investigation of Biden and his son Hunter, who had worked with a Ukrainian energy company. Trump implied American aid depended on it.
The request fed into efforts by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to discredit Biden over his son’s business dealings. Lots of Ukrainian muck would be raked, but none stuck to Biden. Instead, Trump was impeached by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives for blackmailing Zelenskyy, and was acquitted in the Republican-led Senate.
The January 6 riot
In November 2020, Biden defeated Trump with a record 81 million votes, with Trump garnering the nation’s second-biggest-ever total: 74 million.
Trump cried voter fraud, but his claims were shot down in courtrooms across the country. On Jan. 6, a frenzied mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, delaying certification of Biden’s victory, but the new president was inaugurated just the same. Trump was impeached and acquitted a second time, and he now faces federal and Georgia state criminal charges over his efforts overturn the election.
But the pursuit continued.
A ‘cursed’ Biden impeachment probe
In 2022, Republicans won control of the House and launched an impeachment inquiry of their own, targeting Biden and his adult son Hunter, who was the subject of a continuing Trump-era Justice Department probe.
The GOP had a star witness: FBI informant Alexander Smirnoff, who told agents the two Bidens had each pocketed $5 million in Ukrainian bribes. Trump, House Republicans and Fox News hosts made a meme of the so-called “Biden crime family.”
Then, disaster: In February, David Weiss, the Trump-appointed prosecutor who had indicted Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges, announced Smirnoff’s arrest. Smirnoff, the Justice Department said, had lied to the FBI about the Bidens on orders of “officials associated with Russian intelligence.”
Last Monday, as the Democratic National Convention got underway in Chicago, House Republicans released a report – far short of their promised impeachment – accusing Biden of helping his family members receive money from foreign interests by attending dinners and speaking with them on the phone.
“They cursed themselves,” said Norm Eisen, who was special counsel to the first Trump impeachment. “I’ve never seen legislative leadership commit to an impeachment inquiry on a flimsier basis. It was a humiliation.”
A crack in the dam
President Biden faced a special prosecutor of his own: Robert Hur, who was asked to probe Biden’s handling of classified documents after Obama-era materials were found stored in his garage and an office.
Hur recommended against prosecuting Biden, but he dropped a bomb in his February report, writing that the 81-year-old president was an elderly man with “diminished capacities,” including memory loss. Democrats were outraged, and the White House invoked executive privilege to keep House Republicans from getting recordings of Biden’s interviews with Hur.
Republicans pounced. “A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said with other Republican leaders.
A televised debate debacle
Biden shrugged off the Hur fiasco and prepared for what promised to be an exhausting reelection bid.
Then came his June 27 debate with Trump, where Biden’s feeble demeanor and meandering answers horrified Democrats and injected glee into Republican ranks. Further verbal slips only hightened the concern.
In a remarkable stretch of eight days, the campaign was remade.
Trump survived an attempted assassination on July 13, emerging bloodied and furious from a scrum of Secret Service agents in an unprecedented and iconic moment; he named Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate; and he accepted the Republican nomination for president before an ecstatic crowd in Milwaukee.
Biden was hunkered down with Covid for much of this time, as his poll numbers tanked and Democrats, warning of a Trump landslide, panicked. The president had one card left to play and he held it until Sunday, July 21, when Biden pulled out of the race and named Harris his successor at the top of the ticket.
Four and a half weeks later, Trump and his party still haven’t recovered, even as polls show a tight race.
“Harris was left uncovered on a blitz and was wide open, with not a lot of time left on the clock, when the DNC completed the pass,” Upton said of the Democratic convention. “Now only a Hail Mary might save the day for the tired Trump team.”
Trump, pining for the candidate he’d expected to beat handily, has taken to grousing that Harris won the nomination thanks to a “coup,” never mind Biden’s support for her.
“Donald Trump finds himself in the position of running against a ghost,” said Steele, the former Republican chairman.
And Biden has again outfoxed his adversaries.
“He keeps slipping the noose,” Eisen said, “because there is no noose.”
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