Biden projects calm as Trump is again the center of attention

Once again, the world can’t seem to tear itself away from the spectacle that is Donald Trump.

As the former president prepared to surrender himself to the authorities on Tuesday, he vaulted back into the center of the cable TV universe. Helicopters followed his plane and his motorcade. Anchors speculated about his mood. Non-Trump topics — including President Joe Biden — became afterthoughts for the bottom-of-the-screen ticker.

For years, that was the inevitable pattern. Trump won the White House and wielded the presidential bully pulpit by consuming every ounce of political oxygen.

For a brief period after losing reelection, Trump ceded the stage to his successor. Biden claimed the headlines as he withdrew from Afghanistan, battled Congress over his spending agenda and attempted to rally the world to defend Ukraine against a Russian invasion.

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But even occupying the Oval Office is no match for peak Trump scandals. As New York braced for the first criminal arraignment of a former president, Biden met with his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for a high-minded conversation in the State Dining Room. It got few mentions.

It is a political challenge for Biden, who is widely expected to announce a reelection bid in the coming months. On Monday, he delivered a speech in Minnesota about manufacturing and clean energy. CNN kept its cameras trained on the jet branded with the name “TRUMP” as it landed in Manhattan.

White House aides say they welcome that contrast, especially now that the attention on Trump is hardly the kind that any politician would want. But there is no doubt that it will become harder for anyone — Biden included — to deliver a consistent message amid the swirl of the Trump circus.

Publicly, Trump is relishing the attention as he seeks to return to the office he lost in 2020. He plans a prime-time speech from his Mar-a-Lago estate on Tuesday evening after returning to Florida from his New York arraignment.

But privately, associates say Trump is more annoyed than pleased. The former president spent much of his life in New York feeling like an unwanted outsider, never part of the political and financial elites who scorned him. Becoming president was the perfect retort after decades of feeling unappreciated.

His return to New York as a criminal defendant threatens to tarnish that reality in a personal way that not even the scandals during his presidency did.

As he did during his four years in the White House, Trump is suggesting that he is the victim of politically motivated prosecutors who are set on destroying him and the MAGA movement he created.

It remains to be seen whether that message will break through. A poll released by CNN on Monday showed that 60 per cent of Americans approved of the decision by New York prosecutors to indict Trump over the hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels in the last days of the 2016 presidential campaign.