Biden opens the door to revisiting the early days of the pandemic

Ever since President Joe Biden declared his reelection run nearly a year ago, he has largely avoided talking about the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s changing now.

Biden has repeatedly invoked the darkest days of the pandemic in a series of recent speeches, recalling the panic that took hold in early 2020 as schools shuttered, stocks cratered and hospitals became overwhelmed.

"First responders were literally risking their lives. Nurses were in garbage bags as garments because they couldn't get any other help," he said during a fundraiser Tuesday in North Carolina, repeating a sentiment he's expressed at three other events in the last week. "Loved ones were dying all alone and we couldn't even say goodbye to them."

The renewed focus on the crisis' earliest days represents a conscious choice, and one the Biden campaign hopes will prove pivotal as it searches for ways to puncture the Trump-era nostalgia among some swing voters that Democrats believe is both misplaced and buoying the former president.

But it's a strategy that campaign advisers acknowledge must be carefully calibrated — and one that could backfire.

Biden officials long ago agreed that people didn’t want to hear about those times again, and that bringing it up wouldn’t win them many votes come November. The memories are simply too painful, they concluded, and the subsequent response under Biden — punctuated by endless fights over masks, closures and vaccine mandates — proved too divisive.

But as former President Donald Trump seeks to portray his time in office as a long-lost Golden Age, the calculus inside the Biden camp has shifted. They believe Trump can't be given a free pass to act as though his presidency ended after three years, or to act as if the ravages of the pandemic never happened.

And when the ex-president posed the question recently on social media, "ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?" it gave the Biden campaign the opening it was looking for.

“There is a lot of trepidation about talking about Covid,” said one Democrat close to the campaign, who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “But when Trump comes out and says, are you better off, he’s basically inviting comparisons to his complete mismanagement.”

Biden's team is now trying to capitalize on what it believes was a major unforced error on Trump's part, refashioning his invitation for a four-year comparison into an attack on his chaotic handling of a once-in-a-century health threat.

It's a shift that has personally delighted Biden. Aides say the president often privately muses about some of Trump’s most bewildering episodes of 2020 and has relished the chance to recount them in public.

“Remember when he said, 'inject bleach'?” Biden said at a private fundraiser in Houston last week, referring to the infamous April 2020 press conference where Trump suggested researching whether Covid could be treated by injecting disinfectant. “I think he must have done it. He told us to hit the body with UV light, which I’m confident he does.”

On Tuesday, Biden incorporated the story into his public stump speech, calling it evidence that Trump "didn't care much about science and reason during the pandemic that went on to claim 1 million American lives."

"Remember that joke?" he said of the disinfectant incident. "Think I'm making this up?"

Until recently, Biden had spoken on the trail about Covid only in broad strokes, alluding to America’s “comeback” on his watch and celebrating the economic recovery from 2020s pandemic-induced recession.

Despite electing Biden to rein in the virus, voters’ early support for his Covid response eventually splintered along partisan and cultural lines, turning a once-unifying issue into a deep source of bitterness for many.

The pandemic also fundamentally altered major aspects of people’s lives. And dredging up the specifics risks serving as a reminder that, contrary to Biden's initial vow to "shut down the virus," the U.S. may never get back to its pre-2020 normal.

“When we asked about 13 issues back in November to try to figure out what voters wanted to hear candidates talk about, we had Covid-19 on the list,” said Mollyann Brodie, executive director of the public polling and survey research program at health policy nonprofit KFF. “It ranked dead last.”

Inside the Biden campaign, officials are nevertheless betting that they can turn the issue into a referendum on Trump’s overall competence — reminding voters how he behaved in an emergency without getting bogged down in a damaging policy debate.

Biden has so far focused his Covid commentary on 2020’s lowlights, emphasizing the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic’s first weeks. And in his own remarks, as well as an ad the campaign put out on the issue, Biden has studiously avoided critiquing the details of the government’s response, zeroing in instead on Trump’s personal decision-making.

The president also repeatedly raised Trump’s acknowledgment to journalist Bob Woodward that he knew the virus was deadly in February 2020, but decided to “play it down.” That revelation has long animated Biden in private, aides said, and they now hope voters will come to see it as emblematic of Trump’s mismanagement.

“People have really memory-holed the pandemic,” said Gunner Ramer, political director of the anti-Trump nonprofit Republican Accountability Project. “What Joe Biden is trying to do is remind voters why they rejected Trump in the first place.”

A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has struggled with how to talk about Covid since leaving office, veering between claiming credit for developing vaccines in record time and downplaying the achievement because of how unpopular the shots turned out to be with his base.

But he’s yet to pay a political price. Trump breezed through the GOP primary, shrugging off Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attacks on him for initially heeding the recommendations of health experts like Anthony Fauci.

Some Biden advisers remain wary of focusing too much on relitigating Covid for that reason. They note that the campaign likely would not have leaned into the issue if Trump hadn’t raised it first. Biden, notably, has declined to talk about his own Covid response in any detail, keeping the focus of his time in office largely on the economy’s recovery.

But even if it never becomes a core element of the campaign, Democrats believe reminding voters about the peak chaos of 2020 will be crucial to hardening opposition to Trump — and perhaps simultaneously easing people’s reservations about Biden.

“We’re cognizant that 2020 sucked and people have genuine PTSD from it, and no one wants to relive that year,” the Democrat close to the campaign said. “But the reference to Covid is to reinforce the message more broadly that this guy isn’t going to bring you stability. He’s a fucking nut.”