Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman

“You got to give me a big win, please, OK,” the president pleaded with a red-hatted crowd last Thursday in Bossier City, Louisiana.

But on Saturday night, Trump’s wager backfired in spectacular fashion.

Not only did Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, win reelection by more than 40,000 votes, he did so with the same coalition that propelled Govenor-elect Andy Beshear to victory in Kentucky and that could put the president’s reelection chances in grave jeopardy next year. Like Beshear, Edwards energized a combination of African-Americans and moderate whites in and around the urban centers of his state, building decisive margins in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport.

It was a striking setback for a president who proclaimed himself his party’s kingmaker in last year’s midterms, but has a decidedly mixed record when it comes to pushing his chosen candidates to victory in general elections. And it continued a November losing streak that included not only Bevin’s loss in Kentucky, but a wave of state and local Democratic victories in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Missouri that also were driven by suburban voters.

The results in Kentucky and Louisiana are particularly ominous for the president, in part because they indicate that his suburban problem extends to traditionally conservative Southern states and may prove even more perilous in the moderate Midwest next year.

They also reveal political weakness for the president at a moment he is embroiled in a deepening impeachment inquiry and desperately needs to project strength with his own party. And as he enters what will likely be a difficult reelection campaign, the two states emphatically demonstrated that he has become just as much of a turnout lever for the opposition as with his own supporters.

“If you had any doubt that Trump was a human repellent spray for suburban voters who have a conservative disposition, Republicans getting wiped out in the suburbs of New Orleans, Louisville and Lexington should remove it,” said Tim Miller, a Republican strategist and outspoken critic of the president.

The Louisiana results are a stinging rebuke for the president, because he spent so much time there and because Trump allies couldn’t chalk it up entirely to local factors as they did for Kentucky, where Bevin was deeply unpopular. And even before the Louisiana race was called on Saturday night, finger-pointing from the Capitol to the White House to Trump’s campaign broke out about why he spent so much political capital on the race in the first place.

Trump carried Louisiana by 20 points in 2016, so the outcome of the governor’s race carries no implications for his own re-election, the balance of power in Congress or the president’s policy agenda. And the moderate Edwards has relentlessly cultivated Trump, showing up at the White House every chance he gets — so it was not even an opportunity to defeat a critic.

Some of the president’s advisers were mystified, therefore, that the White House would repeatedly send him to a state irrelevant to his reelection for a candidate he scarcely knows, Eddie Rispone, after they had just been scalded in their attempt to rescue Bevin in another safely red state.

In Congress, Louisiana lawmakers and their aides grumbled that Trump was not being shown quality polling indicating how formidable Edwards was with Republican-leaning voters. And some in the delegation pointed a finger at Louisiana’s voluble junior senator, John Kennedy, who has become a close White House ally, for pushing the president to campaign in the state.

But the president was receptive to Republicans who told him he could be the difference-maker in these elections, according to GOP officials briefed on the discussions.

One of those people said that Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, had been preparing the president for the past two weeks for the possibility of a Louisiana loss. That’s because early voting patterns showed Democrats mobilizing their core voters, especially African-Americans. Trump’s supporters defended him, noting that Republicans won down-ballot in Kentucky and captured the Mississippi governor’s race, while arguing that he would benefit from a polarizing opponent next year.

“The gubernatorial results in 2019 in Kentucky and Louisiana are in no way a referendum on President Trump or a foreshadowing of the 2020 presidential election,” said the RNC spokesman Mike Reed. “The Democrats who ran for governor in those red states aren’t anything like the far-left candidates running against President Trump.’’

Still, the main instigator for the president’s involvement in the races, many Republicans said, was Trump himself, who simply craves the adulation of his supporters and is singularly focused on notching victories, no matter the details. He is even more eager to flex his political muscle in the face of impeachment, and has surrounded himself with several aides who either defer to his whims regardless of the neon-flashing signs of risk before them, or know little about politics.People close to Trump — who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive matters — said he viewed the campaigns he had weighed in on mostly as opportunities for gratification. And with few seasoned political advisers in his inner circle — his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has control over the president’s campaign, has never worked on another race — there was nobody to tell him that attacking an anti-abortion rights, pro-gun Democrat like Edwards as a radical would be folly.

“There were people who are normally part of the Republican base who voted for the governor,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, noting that the portrayal of Edwards as a liberal extremist was ineffective given his views on cultural issues and credentials as a West Pointer turned Army Ranger. “He’s a very likable man and a man of character.” Of course, plenty of well-credentialed and well-liked candidates have fallen prey to the forbidding political demographics of their states or districts.

What was different in Louisiana was that Edwards enjoyed a huge spike between the all-party primary last month and the Saturday runoff among the voters who Trump most alienates: While turnout grew modestly in many of the rural areas, it jumped by 29% in New Orleans and 25% in the parish that includes Shreveport, and it was nearly as high in Baton Rouge and in the largest New Orleans suburbs.

In that context, Trump’s two appearances in the state between the primary and runoff had the effect of motivating the Democratic base as much as it did the conservative one.

"Forcing Trump down people’s throats in television, mail and radio produced a backlash among Democratic voters, especially African-Americans,” said Zac McCrary, a pollster on Edwards’ campaign, alluding to Rispone’s Trump-centric message. “The intense negatives outweigh the intense positives for Trump, which speaks to the turnout.”

State and local Democrats were more careful targeting their message, linking Rispone to Trump on radio stations with black audiences and in tailored mailers. But Trump’s engagement also prompted organic efforts, including some from liberals who aren’t exactly enamored with Edwards but wanted to send a message of their own from Louisiana.

One New Orleans Democrat took matters into her own hands and created an Instagram account, @youcanringmybel, that sought to rally reluctant progressives for Edwards.

“We don’t love him but we need him,” said the site’s creator, Marcelle Beaulieu. “Rispone has made the entire campaign about national politics and Trump,” she added, and that annoyed many voters.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)The former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile, a native of the New Orleans area, said the only other time she had been able to nudge her entire extended family to go to the polls was to support former President Barack Obama in 2008. ”Donald Trump just has the same effect of pushing people out the door when they would prefer to stay home,” said Brazile. “I’ve never seen folks more unified.” Trump, of course, is not the first president to be faulted for his party’s losses. But few have so openly invited the risk of being blamed for them. “Donald Trump just happens to relish this centrality more than most,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, “and has a tendency to say the quiet part loud, sometimes to his detriment.”

This article originally appeared in

President Trump Bet Big This Election Year. Here's Why He Lost.

WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump showed up in Louisiana for the third time in just over a month to try to help Republicans win the governor’s race, he veered off script and got to the heart of why he was staging such an unusual political intervention. His attempt to lift Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky to victory this month had failed, Trump explained, and it would look bad for him to lose another race in a heavily Republican state.

As Trump was lashing out at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna S. Pressley, House Democrats were passing a minimum wage bill with scant Republican support and little expectation of Senate passage. On the same day, the president issued a perfunctory announcement naming Eugene Scalia, a corporate lawyer and the son of Antonin Scalia, the former Supreme Court justice, as his new secretary of labor on the recommendation of Sen. Tom Cotton, a hard-line Arkansas conservative.

The events offered a reminder not only of what Trump was interested in — racially driven grabs of media attention — but also of what he was not: governing the way he campaigned in 2016 and co-opting elements of the Democrats’ populist agenda to drive a wedge through their coalition.

Since he became president, Trump has largely operated as a conventional Republican, signing tax cuts that benefit high-end earners and companies, rolling back regulations on corporations and appointing administration officials and judges with deep roots in the conservative movement. His approach has delighted much of the political right.

“Just imagine if Trump married his brand of cultural populism to economic populism,” said Rep. Brendan F. Boyle, a Democrat who represents a working-class district in Philadelphia. “He would be doing much better in the polls and be stronger heading into the general election.”

It is a question many Democrats still fret over: What would Trump’s prospects for reelection look like if he pressured Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, into passing bipartisan measures to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure, lower the cost of prescription drugs and increase the minimum wage?

Some officials in organized labor say those actions would appeal broadly to their rank-and-file and, in some cases, prompt individual unions to stay on the sidelines of the presidential race.

“If he were to pick and choose some of the House Democrats’ bills and embrace them, it would cross-pressure voters and make it a tougher sell for us that this guy is anti-worker,” said Steve Rosenthal, a longtime strategist in the labor movement.

There is still some hope on Capitol Hill that the president will eventually sign a bipartisan measure being crafted in the Senate that could offer consumers a rebate on prescription drugs that rise above the cost of inflation. A Democratic bill, passed almost unanimously last week, would repeal a tax on high-cost health insurance plans that was to help pay for the Affordable Care Act. If it passes the Senate, Trump could promote it as a middle-class tax cut, the way Democrats and unions are.

And he will almost certainly take credit for legislation passed Tuesday that would pay the health care costs of emergency workers who rushed to ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001, for the rest of their lives.

Within the White House, a small group of staff has begun talking about the need to come up with an agenda for 2021 that could be useful for the reelection; Trump, who has seen the criticism on television that he has no forward-looking message, is also mindful of it, people close to the discussion said.

A White House deputy press secretary, Hogan Gidley, noted that Democrats were not exactly looking for deals either.

“When the speaker and Sen. Schumer refuse to even negotiate, it destroys any chance of repairing our infrastructure, reducing health care costs, or making lasting reforms to our failed immigration laws,” he said in a statement, referring to Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. He insisted that Democratic leadership is “so beholden to radical ideologies, they would rather fail to deliver for the American people than allow the president to add more accomplishments to his record.”

Democrats, however, have suggested Gidley’s criticism rings hollow, pointing out that Trump walked out of a meeting with Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that was focused on infrastructure and that the president has said he would not work with Democrats while he was being investigated by Congress.

But Trump faces internal impediments as well. His impulses are often shaped by news coverage, particularly on Fox News, and the views of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, whose members have no desire to find common cause with Democrats.

The president is also largely detached from the legislative process and has rarely been heard discussing what a second-term agenda could look like or how to tie it to his reelection bid. His few bipartisan accomplishments scarcely get mentioned. Trump, for example, rarely discusses the criminal justice overhaul that he signed into law after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made it a personal mission and argued to the president that it could help him with African American voters.

This is all to say Trump has shown no sign of aggressively pursuing the sort of working-class-oriented measures that his one-time adviser Steve Bannon predicted would build an enduring Republican majority.

To be sure, the unemployment rate has continued to fall under Trump, reaching a 50-year low. Wage growth has accelerated modestly and is strongest for the lowest-paid workers in the country. Voters give Trump higher approval on the economy than on his overall performance in office. But most workers are still gaining less under Trump than they did during previous times of low unemployment, such as the late 1990s, and fewer than 2 in 5 respondents to a SurveyMonkey poll for The New York Times this month said their family was better off financially today than a year ago.

With Bannon long gone, Trump is surrounded by conservatives in the White House, such as his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, a former Tea Party congressman who has no appetite for raising the gas tax to pay for an infrastructure bill or to make businesses swallow a minimum-wage increase. In fact, the prospect of a major public works bill has become a running joke among West Wing aides. When midlevel staffers were working on a plan several months ago, Mulvaney was across the country mocking it during an appearance at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in California in April.

A deal struck Monday by Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to set higher spending levels for the next two fiscal years will take still more pressure off the White House to embrace large legislative initiatives — because Trump will have no more major fiscal deadlines this term to press for the kinds of concessions such legislation always takes.

And the moderates in the building who do have Trump’s ear, such as Kushner, are more interested in measures like overhauling the criminal justice system or trying to strike a bipartisan immigration deal than they are eager to notch populist victories that the president could trumpet in the industrial Midwest.

The president’s allies say that his talent is in scorching the opposition, and he is unlikely to deviate much from that task.

“I think he doesn’t mind if it happens, but it’s not his primary focus,” Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker, said of racking up policy accomplishments. “His primary focus is to so thoroughly define Democrats as the party of the radical left. I think that matters much more to him than any particular bill.”

Even Republicans who would be open to a blue-collar agenda say any chance for Trump to cut deals with Democrats has vanished.

“I don’t see the president at this point doing anything with those guys, not as long as they’re coming after him with impeachment,” said former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. “He’s at war.”

It is a notably different environment from Gingrich’s day when, in the heat of the 1996 campaign, sizable majorities in both chambers of Congress passed an increase in the minimum wage bill.

Two Republican senators speaking separately, and on the condition of anonymity to be candid about their political assessment, said they had doubts that such legislation would appreciably move many voters in an era of diamond-hard polarization. Even if McConnell did move legislation, it may only redound to the benefit of the freshman House Democrats facing reelection in swing districts, one senator said.

For the Democrats most eager to see Trump defeated, such inaction is not exactly bad news. They are happy to see him engage in whatever rhetorical food fight piques his interest on a given day.

“This is a testimony to both the strength of McConnell’s convictions and to the weakness of Trump’s convictions,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. “And it also speaks to the power of Mick Mulvaney, who may be the real deep state when all is said and done.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/politics/trump-working-class.html" id="fa6fdc4f-69f9-3df3-acf1-d3afd30621cb">The New York Times</a>.

Despite Rhetorical Appeals, Trump Has Accomplished Little for Working Class

WASHINGTON — History will record last week as a moment when President Donald Trump turned to raw racial appeals to attack a group of nonwhite lawmakers, but his attacks also underscored a remarkable fact of his first term: His rhetorical appeals to white working-class voters have not been matched by legislative accomplishments aimed at their economic interests.

Since he became president, Trump has largely operated as a conventional Republican, signing taxes that benefit high-end earners and companies, rolling back regulations on corporations and appointing administration officials and judges with deep roots in the conservative movement. His approach has delighted much of the political right.

It is a question many Democrats still fret over: What would Trump’s prospects for re-election look like if he pressured Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, into passing bipartisan measures to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure, lower the cost of prescription drugs and increase the minimum wage?

And he will almost certainly take credit for legislation set for final passage Tuesday that would pay the health care costs of emergency workers who rushed to ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001, for the rest of their lives.

Within the White House, a small group of staff has begun talking about the need to come up with an agenda for 2021 that could be useful for the re-election; Trump, who has seen the criticism on television that he has no forward-looking message, is also mindful of it, people close to the discussion said.

The White House’s deputy press secretary, Hogan Gidley, noted that Democrats were not exactly looking for deals either.

“When the speaker and Senator Schumer refuse to even negotiate, it destroys any chance of repairing our infrastructure, reducing health care costs, or making lasting reforms to our failed immigration laws,” he said in a statement, insisting that Democratic leadership is “so beholden to radical ideologies, they would rather fail to deliver for the American people than allow the president to add more accomplishments to his record.”

The president is also largely detached from the legislative process and has rarely been heard discussing what a second-term agenda could look like or how to tie it to his re-election bid. His few bipartisan accomplishments scarcely get mentioned. Trump, for example, rarely discusses the criminal justice overhaul that he signed into law after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made it a personal mission and argued to the president that it could help him with African-American voters.

A deal struck Monday by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to set higher spending levels for the next two fiscal years will take still more pressure off the White House to embrace large legislative initiatives — since Trump will have no more major fiscal deadlines this term to press for the kinds of concessions such legislation always takes.

“I think he doesn’t mind if it happens, but it’s not his primary focus,” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said of racking up policy accomplishments. “His primary focus is to so thoroughly define Democrats as the party of the radical left. I think that matters much more to him than any particular bill.”

Two Republican senators speaking separately, and on the condition of anonymity to be candid about their political assessment, said they had doubts that such legislation would appreciably move many voters in an era of diamond-hard polarization. Even if McConnell did move legislation, it may only redound to the benefit of the freshman House Democrats facing re-election in swing districts, one senator said.

The president is also largely detached from the legislative process and has rarely been heard discussing what a second-term agenda could look like or how to tie it to his reelection bid. His few bipartisan accomplishments scarcely get mentioned. Trump, for example, rarely discusses the criminal justice overhaul that he signed into law after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made it a personal mission and argued to the president that it could help him with African-American voters.

A deal struck Monday by Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to set higher spending levels for the next two fiscal years will take still more pressure off the White House to embrace large legislative initiatives — since Trump will have no more major fiscal deadlines this term to press for the kinds of concessions such legislation always takes.

But not just any Democratic president.

“China is DREAMING that Sleepy Joe Biden, or any of the others, gets elected in 2020,” Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday. “They LOVE ripping off America!”

By Monday afternoon, Biden, making his first trip to New Hampshire since entering the 2020 race, was happily returning fire, criticizing the Twitter-borne blur of threats and flattery Trump had aimed at Beijing. “He’s going about it all the wrong way, a lot of bravado, no action,” the former vice president told reporters.

It is just the sort of fight Biden has been spoiling for: a head-to-head contest with the incumbent on an issue that elevates Biden into a statesmanlike role, well above the Democratic primary fray and all the sniping candidates and liberal litmus tests therein.

For Trump’s advisers, it was one more example of the president’s inability to resist offering what amounts to an in-kind contribution to a Democrat who, according to their own polling, is positioned to soundly defeat them next year.

The president, though, has told advisers he believes he can portray Biden, a longtime Washington veteran, as representative of an ossified political class the same way he did Hillary Clinton, wounding him with enough attacks and put-downs that Biden will either stagger into the general election or collapse in the primary.

In the three weeks since Biden announced his candidacy, Trump has tried out two nicknames on him, accused his opponent and family members of corrupt dealings with Ukraine (prompting a coordinated Democratic response) and argued that he is naïve about the threats America faces.

Early this month, as Biden began his campaign with the endorsement of the firefighters union, Trump unleashed a barrage of almost 60 tweets and retweets about his own support from rank-and-file union members, signaling his anxiety about Biden’s standing with a crucial constituency. Aides have said that Trump is keenly aware that he won in 2016 with support from union voters who did not follow their leaders in backing Hillary Clinton.

But after all that, he then likened Biden’s bid to his own 2016 campaign, in which Trump never relinquished the lead after ascending in the polls, and suggested Biden would probably be the Democratic nominee.

Trump’s attacks on Biden have defied the pleadings of his own aides, who think almost any other candidate would be easier to defeat, and left Republicans puzzled while delighting Biden supporters.

“It just shows everybody that the vice president is the candidate Trump is most concerned about,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., a Biden supporter, adding with evident relish: “He just can’t help himself during executive time.”

Matt Gorman, a veteran of past Republican presidential campaigns, said that Trump was simply handing Biden a gift.

“In a Democratic primary, attacks from President Trump are the best thing that can happen to you,” Gorman said. “It elevates you, gives you a huge fundraising boost and sucks the oxygen from your competitors.”

The president’s drumbeat of attacks on Biden have also gotten the attention of congressional Republicans, who would prefer a more easily caricatured boogeyman on top of the Democratic ticket next year. “Bernie Sanders is the perfect guy for us,” said Chris LaCivita, a longtime Republican strategist, referring to the senator from Vermont. “He looks like the professor out of ‘Back to the Future’ and is a hard-core socialist.”

Trump’s offensive has also hastened calls by GOP officials to bring together White House aides, Trump campaign officials and Capitol Hill Republicans in a gathering similar to one last year at Camp David, according to a senior Republican Senate official.

Yet some Democrats, having witnessed how Trump lampooned and eventually bulldozed the Republican field in 2016, are nervous that Trump has shrewdly chosen to define Biden as the front-runner early on, identifying him as the greatest threat in a general election.

Republicans at the super PAC supporting Trump have echoed this theory, telling people in recent weeks that the party must begin eroding Biden’s credibility now and portray him as the picture of a rotten status quo, according to an official at the organization.

Officials at the super PAC, America First Action, have argued that doing so would allow Trump to maintain the outsider image he cultivated during the 2016 campaign, never mind that he is an incumbent president.

But some Republicans close to Trump paint a more simplistic portrait of the president’s actions: That he has simply been consuming cable news coverage about Biden, and firing off tweets based on the coverage and polling on the Democratic race he hears about on the air. And senior Trump campaign aides have recently told other Republican officials that they would rather not face Biden in the general election, according to one party figure familiar with the conversations.

Trump’s aides are not united on the best way to undercut Biden. His initial strength in the Democratic primary has surprised them.

A recent survey of battleground states conducted for the Trump campaign by a leading Republican pollster, Tony Fabrizio, showed Biden handily beating Trump, according to three people briefed on the results. Sanders did not fare as well against Trump in the poll, but also was besting Trump head-to-head in key states., these people said.

Separately, Republicans who are hoping to rescue Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, one of the party’s most imperiled incumbents, have found Biden leading Trump in that state, which no Democratic presidential candidate has carried since 1996.

Trump has been told about his campaign’s polling, although it was unclear how extensive a briefing he was given. Still, his aides and allies have urged him to stop throwing attention to Biden, arguing that it is better to have the Democrats fight it out and weaken one another over the course of their primary.

”The campaign must force Biden back into the Democratic primary,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist. “They’ve allowed him to start a general election strategy unscathed by a potential bear pit created by the populist left. Sanders and Warren are your first lines of defense — and they must be weaponized to attack, especially on China.”

Asked about the president’s focus on Biden, a Trump campaign spokesman, Tim Murtaugh, said they “view the Democrat field as one big socialist organism with more than 20 heads, Joe Biden included.” He then hammered Biden on trade agreements, manufacturing job losses and his comments on the campaign trail in Iowa downplaying China’s threat to the United States.

Trump’s unrelenting attacks have only prompted the former vice president to keep baiting the president, inserting lines into his stump speech he hopes will be picked up by the media and create a new cycle of attack-and-response.

On Monday, in New Hampshire, Biden invoked Trump’s stinging characterization of the state’s opioid difficulties.

“One of the worst statements he made when he was on the phone with the president of Mexico was to refer to New Hampshire as a quote, ‘drug-infested den,’” Biden said in Manchester.

Trump, who has called Biden “Sleepy Joe” and “SleepyCreepyJoe,” has in turn seized on one of the former vice-president’s gaffes, noting that Biden referred to British Prime Minister Theresa May as Margaret Thatcher. “That was a beauty,” the president told Politico last week.

On Tuesday, at a taxpayer-funded and ostensibly policy-focused energy forum in Louisiana, the president asked “What the hell happened to Biden?” and compared him unfavorably to Sanders.

“Bernie’s crazy, but he’s got a lot more energy than Biden, so you never know,” said Trump.

But it is not Sanders who is the focus of attention at the Republican National Committee, which is often directed to act by White House officials. The committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, has used her Twitter account to target Biden multiple times, attacking him for letting “China get away with unfair trade practices” just hours before the president spoke Tuesday.

And last week, the RNC’s research department blasted out an email to reporters with a mountain of opposition research headlined: “Joe Biden Has Made A Career Of Being Soft On China.”

Perhaps most striking, Trump’s personal lawyer, the former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, even sought to travel to Ukraine to meet with the country’s president-elect and urge him to pursue an inquiry into the role of Biden’s son, Hunter, in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch.

Giuliani only backed off after Democrats cried foul. (The Democratic pushback against the aborted mission to Kiev was coordinated by a Biden adviser, Antony J. Blinken, according to a senior Democratic official.)

Trump himself was surprised by Giuliani’s proposed trip, according to Republicans briefed on his thinking, but he has hardly taken a hands-off role on Hunter Biden: The president said last week that a potential Department of Justice investigation into the matter “would be an appropriate thing” for him to discuss with Attorney General William Barr.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9c8aa7c8-7863-3bea-af30-8ed7587dbb7e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/politics/trump-biden-2020.html">The New York Times</a>.

When Trump Snipes at Biden, Republican Strategists Wince

WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump has struggled to explain the difficulty of negotiating a trade agreement with China, he has embraced a side argument: A Democratic president would only agree to a worse deal.

When Trump snipes at Biden, Republican strategists wince

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Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman

Articles written by the author

President Trump Bet Big This Election Year. Here's Why He Lost.

Despite Rhetorical Appeals, Trump Has Accomplished Little for Working Class

Despite Rhetorical Appeals, Trump Has Accomplished Little for Working Class

Despite Rhetorical Appeals, Trump Has Accomplished Little for Working Class

When Trump snipes at Biden, Republican strategists wince