Biden camp hunts for Trump missteps while bashing ‘cheap fakes’ – Washington Examiner

The White House is countering Republican attempts to paint President Joe Biden as in mental decline with a strategy that casts GOP-cut videos of his alleged stumbles as misinformation.

Biden’s advisers even believe they can go on offense with their own social media scrutiny of apparent missteps by former President Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

Voters have consistently cited Biden’s age as a concern as they weigh whether to give him a second term as president. Trump, his Republican rival, is not much younger, but Biden’s seeming forgetfulness, reinforced by a bombshell report from special counsel Robert Hur earlier this year, has become a focal point in the 2024 contest.

The Republican National Committee has found viral success amplifying the narrative by sharing clips of Biden at official and campaign events from its account on X, while the Trump campaign has taken a similar approach.

It is a perception the White House has been saddled with for much of Biden’s presidency. He is the oldest president in U.S. history and would be 86 at the end of a second term, while Trump’s long-winding speeches and campaign schedule have so far largely insulated him from the same critiques.

Biden is sure to face the same scrutiny at Thursday’s presidential debate, his first with Trump since 2020, where Republicans will be hoping to seize on any verbal blunders.

However, the White House believes it can flip the narrative on its head with a two-part campaign to cast doubt on the authenticity of Republicans’ video clips while sharing footage of Trump they say will reinforce the idea he is unfit for office.

The White House has dubbed the GOP clips as “cheap fakes,” a play on the recently coined term “deepfake.” Cheap fakes selectively edit or crop video with the goal of promoting a narrative, while deepfakes use technology, including artificial intelligence, to manufacture the videos entirely.

In one recent instance, a video seemingly showed Biden trying to sit in an “invisible” chair while in France, whereas the chair comes into view in the full clip.

Republicans say there is no need to deceptively edit the videos and that Biden’s demeanor is to blame for voter impressions about his age. But the White House has attempted to discredit the “bad faith” videos altogether by highlighting examples in which the clips were debunked by fact checkers.

“One dimension to this is defense, but sometimes good defense can turn into offense in the sense that it might introduce people to the idea that, ‘Wait a second, maybe the next time that I see one of these, I should be skeptical,’” a senior White House official told the Washington Examiner.

That is only one-half of the approach by Biden’s advisers, however. The official noted that the Biden campaign routinely goes on “honest” offense with a focus on Trump.

The campaign confirmed the approach, telling the Washington Examiner that staffers are keeping eyes on “every moment of Donald Trump’s every move” and amplifying what campaign officials called “his unhinged rants, threats of political violence, and promises to ban abortion nationwide in real time and making sure voters see them on their feeds and understand the stakes of this election.”

The president’s campaign launched its BidenHQ social brands in September 2023, with accounts logging nearly 2 billion impressions since then and doubling their rate of growth in 2024 compared to 2023.

“Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have to resort to pathetically manipulating and distorting footage of President Biden because they can’t successfully attack his record of delivering results for the American people,” Biden campaign spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg told the Washington Examiner. “Meanwhile, Trump’s extreme rants look deranged and unhinged without any editing.”

The Trump campaign discounted the Biden campaign’s defense, arguing that the former president, who is just under four years younger than Biden, is “sharp as a tack as evidenced by his hour-long off-script rally speeches, near daily interactions with the hostile news media, and incomparable memory recall.”

“Our team is simply posting real videos of brain-dead Joe Biden for the American people to see,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The Biden campaign’s team, made up of imbecilic junior staffers, is working overtime to cut out-of-context clips of President Trump’s words, like the infamous ‘Bloodbath’ hoax which was quickly debunked.”

It is unclear whether the war for viral moments on social media will do much to change voter perceptions. Voters were almost twice as likely, 67% to 37%, to describe Biden as too old to be president compared to Trump in a Gallup poll released Thursday.

But the Biden team is relying on what it calls a network of “trusted messengers” who have countered Republican lines of attack since he entered office to make a dent in that impression. The group, which includes both traditional grassroots organizers and social media influences, is being used to help challenge “cheap fakes” as well.

“We coordinate with those folks on just about everything, whether it’s like an announcement that we’re making, like the immigration one last week, or if we’re responding to some kind of criticism,” a senior White House official told the Washington Examiner. “Because we think that you basically always have to give everybody the same resources to try and break through because breaking through is increasingly hard.

“There are a lot of people that don’t take in any news, and you’re hoping that you can just get across to them,” that person continued. “So it’s wise to just try and make sure that everybody who amplifies you has the same song sheet.”

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The debate will yet again provide a chance for each side to clip the moments they see as portraying their opponent in the worst light, but one veteran Democratic operative predicted voters seeing both men onstage for 90 minutes will give the public a truer impression.

“It’s not a surprise Republicans are resorting to these cheap gimmicks to try to damage President Biden, and given just how close this race is, it’s too soon to say if voters are listening to either side over the other,” the operative told the Washington Examiner. “That’s why this debate is going to be so critical. It’s one thing to see some clip be edited and taken out of context, as opposed to both men appearing in the same space to pitch voters on their visions for America.”