Biden Should Not Just Go For Trump’s ‘Jugular’ — He Should Light It On Fire With Pile Of Bottle Rockets

President Joe Biden is champing at the bit to go for Trump’s jugular with a barrage of daily taunts — he should do it spectacularly if he’s going to do it at all.

Amid reporting this week on the president’s eagerness to go for Trump’s “jugular” — an urge that has been evident for months — there’s renewed chatter about how the president can best combat Trump as he also fights dopey media narratives and double standards and perceptions about age that have dogged him but have just begun to stick to Trump.

The idea is that by taunting Trump, constantly and cutting him deeply, Biden can put him “on tilt” – poker parlance for throwing an opponent into a self-destructive rage spiral. The logic is sound, and already appears to be showing signs of success.

CNN reported in January that Biden’s taunting about the 2020 election gets under Trump’s skin and “rattles him” according to one Trumpworld source.

And 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 — all because Biden went on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, and cracked that Trump is “about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name.”

This is not an especially new idea. 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. and in a new interview that came out the day before the “jugular” story. There was a single “loser” reference, but it was executed with flair — Biden named Trump among “losers who are losers.”

But Trump‘s thin skin has been evident for as long as skin has existed. We all remember how then-President Barack Obama destroyed Trump at the WHCD in 2012 – which appears to have motivated Trump‘s ultimately successful run for the White House. And during the 2016 campaign, Marco Rubio made fun of his penis, and goaded him into talking about his dick during a national televised debate. Trump is extremely easy to throw off balance.

Unfortunately, for Rubio, and for other candidates who have figured out too late that they can’t beat Trump by constantly fluffing him, none of them has had what it takes go the distance in verbal combat with Trump. I’m sure once Trump brought up his penis on stage, Rubio was convinced his work was done. We saw how that worked out.

But Biden has an advantage over the lakes of Rubio and Chris Christie and Nikki Haley. President Biden has never melted before Trump and offered the words of worship that are required to exist in Republican politics. His attacks on Trump don’t have the false stink of a vanquished rival who went crawling back to Trump or a vanquished rival who will soon go crawling back.

Thus far, Biden has also largely restricted his attacks to deeply held topics like January 6 and democracy and White supremacy, not withstanding the crack about forgetting his wife’s name. One poorly understood difference between Biden and the Republicans who have tried to take Trump down is that Biden is genuinely outraged by the things that Trump has done, and Trump‘s utter lack of decency.

But a jugular strategy will require the president to go beyond the material he has honed in the years since Charlottesville. The president should think up a new way to call Trump a losing loser for every day of the week and get himself in front of a camera, saying them every single day.

And unlike most people, Trump is unafraid of repetition. The president can’t be either; he needs to brand Trump in the same way that Trump brands his opponents, only less dopey.

Joe Scarborough suggested every Biden surrogate should be out there calling Trump a rapist. James Carville says “adjudicated rapist,” but that’s not very catchy. I don’t know if President Biden will ever be the kind of guy who goes out on a daily basis to slam “Rapin’ Losin’ Trump,” but you get the idea.

To take the strategy even further, there should be a team of insult comics locked in a beach house in Rehoboth Beach doing nothing but thinking up new ways for President Biden and his surrogates to insult Trump and murder boarding responses to whatever they think Trump might say in return.

There’s very little downside to a strategy like this because whatever media criticism Biden might take over it, would be the same thing he gets on a daily basis for literally anything he does. This is a man who took shit from the media for going to too many funerals to comfort people.

But the upside is tremendous. As I said, it would be a bonanza of free earned media. It would improve his image among voters in terms of his energy. And even his occasional misspeaks would recede from the fore as people grew accustomed to seeing him more and paid more attention to the lighting on fire of the jugular.

And the potentially most significant upside would be a more unhinged and rattled Trump — and who knows what will come out of a rattled Trump’s mouth? Remember how he completely lost it when Kaitlan Collins challenged him and he ended up confessing to a bunch of crimes on national television? Hell, Biden could even get him to blurt out the location of Jimmy Hoffa.

The biggest potential downside is not being prepared to keep trading blows with Trump no matter what he throws back. Because that’s the other unpredictable part of this, Trump will literally do or say anything. So go for the jugular, but just don’t stop and don’t miss.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.