WATCH: Maggie Haberman Says Campaign Will Be ‘Incredible Nasty’ Because of Trump — But Biden Can ‘Point To An Actual Record’

CNN analyst Maggie Haberman said ex-President Donald Trump is going to make the campaign “incredibly nasty” and that President Joe Biden has an “actual record” to run on this time around.

Haberman was a guest on Thursday’s edition of CNN’s The Situation Room to discuss reports that Biden will officially announce his long-teased 2024 reelection campaign.

Haberman — an influential analyst to whom Trump pays a lot of attention — predicted Trump would make things ugly, and said Biden is better positioned in some ways than he was in 2020:

MARQUARDT: I want to bring in The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, also a CNN contributor. Maggie, we are constantly reminded by former President Trump himself that he is the Republican frontrunner, and he leads the Republican field, primary field, by double digits. So, how do you think President Trump is going to react to this news that President Biden is planning on launching his re-election campaign?

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I think he’s going to paint himself as the only person who can beat Biden, which I think a lot of Republicans do not agree with, but I think you’re going to hear that over and over. I think that Donald Trump’s main focus is going to be, you know, Ron DeSantis and the people who are coming at him in the Republican primary.

But it will be interesting to see how much President Biden’s announcement breaks through. There has been, on the one hand, I think, content from a lot of Democrats to watch Donald Trump’s problems, particularly legally play out because those are just not general election winners in their minds. And yet, I think there’s been a lot of frustration by the White House that what Biden has been doing as president is not necessarily breaking through in the press and to the public. So, I think that you are going to see a bit of both in the next week.

…

MARQUARDT: And, Maggie, now we are staring down the possibility, very distinct possibility of you know the exact same candidates running as we saw in 2020. This is not necessarily a matchup that millions of Americans want to see. So, when you look at this potential matchup between Biden and Trump yet again, how different do you think this race would be four years on?

HABERMAN: Look, I think it’s going to be much uglier. I think you’re going to have Biden able to point to an actual record, which is going to be, you know, different than what we saw in 2020. He was running on the promise of a return to normalcy, and I think that this White House believes that they have largely accomplished that. They have also accomplished a number of other things.

I think that for Trump, you are going to see him described President Biden’s term as, you know, being poorly waged. I think that he is going to hope that there is — you know, there are other aspects in life in America that he can point to, such as saying that, you know, the economy was better under him. I think that, you know, right now we’ll see how that plays out.

But I also think you are looking at two people who are, you know, 75 years-plus, Biden is older than Trump, but not by much. The voters in this country, as you point out, have not felt great about their choices, not just the last election, but in 2016 as well, and yet they have gotten these elections uglier and uglier, and that is really largely a product of how Donald Trump wages politics.

So, I expect that this is going to be incredibly nasty, and an X factor is what Biden running is going to look like. COVID so fundamentally — campaign, we’ll see what happens now.

Watch above via CNN’s The Situation Room.

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