The freshly anointed presidential campaign rematch cracked open a new chapter Thursday, with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris visiting the Midwest – one with a problem to fix, the other a base to galvanize – and former President Donald Trump opting for a seat in a Florida courtroom.
Biden, who, like Trump, clinched his party’s presidential nomination earlier this week, began the day in Wisconsin before heading to Michigan, perhaps the most volatile of battleground states, where his primary victory some two weeks ago was undermined in part by an estimable number of dissenting Democratic votes – for “uncommitted” – in protest of his handling of Israel’s war in Gaza. Harris is nearby in Minnesota, making what is believed to be the first visit of a sitting president or vice president to a clinic that provides abortion services.
Trump, too, has been out to stoke his base, on this day like so many others, by sitting – of his own volition – in a Florida courtroom with a pair of co-defendants as their lawyers try to convince a judge to dismiss charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith in the former president’s classified documents case.
The opening rounds of this new phase of a long presidential contest has provided a telling contrast between Biden, who is diving into traditional campaign work, and Trump, who has baselessly fashioned himself as the target of a politically driven conspiracy to undermine his candidacy. It is a clash not only of wildly opposing worldviews and policy priorities, in the conventional sense, but of competing strategies for gaining – and holding – political power in a deeply divided country.
Biden’s and Harris’s trips are being backed up by a planned meeting between senior White House officials and Arab, Muslim and Palestinian American community…
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