AMAC EXCLUSIVE
With Joe Biden’s re-election campaign in serious jeopardy, the president and his team appear to be turning to a familiar strategy that Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, employed to great success in his 2012 re-election effort – waging class warfare and attempting to cast his opponent as an avatar of wealthy, out-of-touch elites. 12 years ago, the Obama campaign hammered Republican nominee Mitt Romney for his personal wealth and Wall Street ties, asserting that he could never understand the financial needs of everyday Americans. (Romney is reported to have a net worth in excess of $170 million, and had a background as a private equity executive who had led corporate takeovers involving major job losses.) The corporate media, always eager to help advance a Democrat narrative, famously pounced on Romney’s plans to install a “car elevator” in one of his homes as a symbol of just how disconnected he was from the experience of ordinary Americans. The story plagued the former Massachusetts governor all the way through Election Day, as did his infamous “47 percent” comment. In the end, the ad hominem attacks worked, and Obama won re-election with a victory in working-class Ohio. Now, Biden appears to be attempting to run the same play against Donald Trump, ramping up shots at the former president’s personal wealth in recent weeks. But painting the populist former president as an out-of-touch elitist will likely be a much tougher task than framing Romney as a plutocrat. During a swing through Pennsylvania last month, Biden billed himself as a champion of the working class while, as The New York Times put it, attempting to “Romnify Trump.” At a campaign stop in Scranton, Biden alleged that growing up he “learned that money doesn’t determine your worth” while Trump “learned the best way to get rich is inherit it” and believes “that paying taxes was something people who worked for a living did, not him.” (An interesting charge considering that Biden’s own son has been indicted for numerous federal tax crimes, while Trump likely pays more in taxes in a year than Biden has paid in his entire life.) Biden further asserted that November’s election is a choice between “Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values,” referring to Trump’s iconic Florida property, where the former president has resided since leaving the White House. During another campaign event in the Sunshine State just a few weeks later, Biden again stoked class division, trotting out one of his favorite (repeatedly discredited) line that billionaires only pay 8.3 percent in taxes. Biden also again accused Trump of supporting “trickle-down economics… where the very wealthy get all the tax breaks.” With just over six months to go until Election Day, Biden appears to be leaning hard into the class warfare angle, hoping that it will produce the same results it did for Obama in 2012. But this strategy has several major flaws that will likely make it just as ineffective as his “Bidenomics” push or the ongoing Democrat efforts to use the legal system to sabotage Trump’s comeback bid. For starters, Joe Biden is no Barack Obama—and Donald Trump is not Mitt Romney. Yes, Romney and Trump are both wealthy, but Trump has never exuded the elitist demeanor that Biden is now attempting to pin on him. Photos of Trump enjoying McDonalds and KFC on Air Force One or sipping a Diet Coke in the Oval Office attest to the fact that he is far from the snobby rich stereotype. Unlike Romney in 2012, Trump has never run from or tried to hide his wealth. Trump was arguably the most famous rich person in the world before he ever ran for president. His very name was synonymous with glitz, glamor, and wealth. What Democrats like Clinton and Biden fail to understand is that everyday Americans of all economic classes respect authenticity, and Trump is as authentic a politician as Americans have seen in decades. Biden appears on course to make the same mistake Hillary Clinton did eight years ago. The Clinton campaign assumed blue-collar Americans would hate Trump because he is rich, but instead they hated Clinton for (in addition to so many other things) believing they could be so easily manipulated by simply labeling Trump as wealthy. In this respect, it is Biden that could be facing the real image problem with voters when it comes to his financial status. Trump publicly and unabashedly lived the American Dream, building a real estate empire while finding success as a reality TV star along the way. Biden, meanwhile, has faced serious allegations of illegally using his political influence to secretly amass personal wealth (reportedly about $10 million) while falsely portraying himself as “Middle Class Joe” and “the poorest man in Congress.” Moreover, Trump has an actual record of fighting for the economic interests of the working- and middle-class that immediately undermines Biden’s attempts to use class warfare as a campaign strategy. For instance, as much as Biden likes to falsely claim that Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was just a tax cut for the wealthy, the actual economic evidence says middle- and working-class Americans saw a tax cut that was at least double the size of tax cuts seen by households earning $1 million or more. That’s just one reason why 40 percent of Americans say Trump’s policies helped them personally, while just 18 percent say the same of Biden. Trump’s deregulatory agenda also led to an average annual increase in household income of $3,100. Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty decreased by 2.5 million over the first two years of the Trump administration. His renegotiated trade deals were a boon for American industry, and his protective tariffs helped re-shore tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. All of this also came at great expense to Trump himself. In addition to donating his entire presidential salary to charity, Trump’s net worth reportedly dropped by more than $700 million while he was in office – an immense sacrifice that clearly conveys his love for the country and its people. As Trump has often said, he’s the only person who ever got poorer by being president. Under Biden, meanwhile, less well-off Americans have been hit especially hard by inflation caused by runaway spending. But instead of helping them, Biden has worked to give lucrative subsidies to his political allies in the climate change lobby, secure loan forgiveness for wealthy college graduates, and give tax credits to rich liberals who can afford to buy electric vehicles. Biden can try all he wants to mimic Obama and turn Trump into Mitt Romney 2.0. But all available evidence suggests most Americans won’t find it very convincing – and it may even backfire on Biden himself. Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @ShaneHarris513.
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