President Biden predicted in a rare interview published Monday that his rival, former President Donald Trump, will not accept a second straight defeat at the hands of the Democrat in the Nov. 5 general election — while a top adviser to Biden’s re-election campaign indicated it will go hard after Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
“Losers who are losers are never graceful,” Biden told The New Yorker of the 45th president. “I just think that he’ll do anything to try to win.
“If — and when — I win,” the 81-year-old added. “I think he’ll contest it no matter what the result is.”
Biden expressed confidence that he would secure a second term despite trailing Trump, 77, in every major poll, telling the magazine: “I’m the only one who has ever beat him. And I’ll beat him again.”
Meanwhile, Biden 2024 chief strategist Mike Donilon, described by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) as the “high priest of Bidenism,” told the New Yorker he and his team are betting big that memories of Trump supporters ransacking the Capitol will outweigh discontent over the economy, immigration and foreign policy.
“The focus will become overwhelming on democracy,” by Nov. 5, Donilon posited. “I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”
Donilon went on to compare the current race to the 2004 contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry.
“The Democratic Party didn’t want to believe it was a 9/11 election,” he recalled. “I decided, after the election, I would never be part of a Presidential campaign that didn’t figure out—with clarity—what it wanted to say and stick to it.”
While a plethora of polling has shown that voters tend to negatively view the Capitol riot as an attack on democracy and even think that Trump committed crimes, many of those same polls also show him beating Biden.
Currently, Trump touts a 2.3-point lead over Biden in the RealClearPolitics aggregate of national polls and has the edge in a handful of key battleground states as well.
“Crooked Joe Biden is such a disaster that he makes Jimmy Carter look like an effective president. He can barely put two coherent sentences together and slowly shuffles around like he has a full diaper in his pants, often falling on his ass in front of the world,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told The Post.
“Americans have lived through four years of misery and destruction, and they want a return to President Trump’s successful America First policies.”
Some Democrats are also wary of the Biden campaign making Jan. 6 a point of emphasis.
“I’m pretty certain in Scranton they’re not sitting around their dinner table talking about democracy every night,” former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod told the New Yorker before reiterating his concerns about Biden’s age.
“I don’t question his competence as President,” Axelrod said of Obama’s former VP. “You give me Biden’s record and take fifteen years off of him, and this wouldn’t be a competitive race.”
However, Alexrod added, “the march of time is immutable.”
Undeterred by bleak polling, the commander-in-chief is publicly relishing the chance to play the underdog yet again.
“Remember, in 2020, you guys told me how I wasn’t going to win? And then you told me in 2022 how it was going to be this red wave?” Biden told the New Yorker. “And in 2023 you told me we’re going to get our ass kicked again and we won every contested race out there?”
The octogenarian added that he never doubted he’d run again, despite the fact that he’d finish off a hypothetical full second term at age 86.
“I’m running again because I think two things: No. 1, I’m really proud of my record, and I want to keep it going. I’m optimistic about the future,” he said. “And, secondly … most of what I’ve done is just kicking in now.”