The Biden campaign is promoting a split screen post featuring two videos of Donald Trump speaking — approximately four years apart — on the campaign trail. In the first, the incumbent Trump forebodingly predicts a Wall Street calamity if Biden were to be elected.
“If Biden wins, you’re going to have a stock market collapse the likes of which you’ve never had,” Trump says from the campaign stump in the 2020 clip below. (That crash never materialized and the Dow Jones and S&P 500 have continued to set records during the Biden administration.)
The second video shows Trump campaigning last week and admitting — without reference to his previous prediction — that the stock market is soaring. In the clip, Trump then takes credit for the market’s rise, claiming that the “biggest, smartest guys on Wall Street” tell him the market is rising because they “think I’m going to win the election.”
Left: Trump in 2020 saying the stock market will collapse if President Biden wins
Right: Trump now admitting the stock market is reaching record highs under President Biden but desperately trying to take credit for it pic.twitter.com/8V5DWWE96W
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 2, 2024
Amplifying the two speeches, the Biden campaign aims to call out Trump on his mistaken Wall Street prediction — and with it trigger doubts about the legitimacy of Trump’s other doom and gloom predictions. But as Trump dubiously claims credit for the soaring market, the audience he is speaking to, to judge by the applause, finds it plausible that the market is up because of Trump’s potential return to office.
[NOTE: The consensus is that the market is rising because of a virtual gold rush on Artificial Intelligence technology, which the Biden administration can take some credit for enabling with the CHIPS Act.]
But no President can control the market’s rise or fall — otherwise it goes without saying that every president would command that the stock market go up. (The market rose under Trump’s administration, too.)
Biden’s campaign continues to feature videos of Trump saying things it believes its audience — Democratic voters — will find beyond the pale. There remains for Biden the thorny question about whether his campaign’s amplification of Trump’s performances in heavy rotation is working, as polls haven’t shown Biden rising as a result.
[NOTE: The intent is overt — CNN headlined a February article Biden makes it clear that he wants 2024 to be a referendum on Trump and political operative David Axelrod told the network that “Biden must confront Trump in a ‘colloquial’ way.”]
The Biden campaign remains all in on the tactic, lending Trump free media (which they hope makes him look bad) by posting segments of the former president’s speeches. This weekend the Biden-Harris HQ campaign X account — over the course of six hours — shared 27 straight Trump posts in a row.
A confused Trump claims he passed veterans legislation that was signed by President Obama in 2014 pic.twitter.com/LDtEtDFVny
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 3, 2024