Biden Aide Says If Trump ‘Triggered’ By Loser Taunts That’s Trump’s Problem

A senior aide to President Joe Biden told Mediaite that if former President Donald Trump is “triggered” by the president taunting him, that’s Trump’s problem, not Biden’s.

At issue is a piece of Axios reporting on the president’s eagerness to go for Trump’s “jugular” — an urge that has been evident for months. President Biden sharpened and escalated his attacks on Trump for months at off-camera campaign events, roughly around the time Trump began using language that was widely criticized as Hitler-esque.

Those attacks continued once the president began delivering campaign speeches on-camera starting in January.

According to a source close to Trump, one attack gets under Trump’s skin in particular: the taunts about losing the election in 2020. It’s a note that the president has hit repeatedly in speeches and in a print interview published Monday.

In a new profile by The New Yorker magazine’s Evan Osnos, Biden hit Trump with a combo, telling Osnos “Losers who are losers are never graceful,” and adding “I just think that he’ll do anything to try to win. If—and when—I win, I think he’ll contest it. No matter what the result is.”

The following day, Hans Nichols and Alex Thompson dropped their item about Biden champing at the bit to unload on Trump. The topline bullets:

President Biden is privately pushing for a much more aggressive approach to 2024: Go for Donald Trump’s jugular.

Why it matters: Biden is convinced he’ll rattle Trump if he taunts him daily.

• Biden has told friends he thinks Trump is wobbly, both intellectually and emotionally, and will explode if Biden mercilessly gigs and goads him — “go haywire in public,” as one adviser put it.
• Other sources tell us that Biden is looking for a fight.

Biden’s open contempt for Trump and willingness to go on the attack go back a long way, but the difference now may be that he appears to be striking a nerve. Last week, Trump put out a wild and lengthy rant on Truth Social in which he again insisted that his repeated gaffes have been deliberate and that he did not forget his wife’s name and call her “Mercedes” at CPAC.

The triggering event for that rant was a wisecrack Biden made last week in an appearance on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, during which he cracked that Trump is “about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name.”

Asked about the strategy, a senior Biden aide told Mediaite, “The president is just telling the truth. If that’s triggering to Donald Trump that sounds like a him problem.”

That’s consistent with what sources in the White House and the Biden campaign have been projecting in private, that what others call attacks are just facts. They’re keen to draw a distinction between what the president does and the sorts of attacks that Trump engages in.