Politico

Donald Trump’s CNN town hall on Wednesday night was viewed as a gift from the political gods inside Biden world.

But within broader Democratic circles it fed a nagging and growing concern. Is the president’s team a touch too confident about a Trump-Biden rematch?

For more than a year, White House aides and Joe Biden allies have beat the same drum about the coming election: The world doubted us before and we’ll prove them wrong again. That conviction has only been fortified by the last two years, in which major legislative strides and a better-than-expected midterm came in the face of routine skepticism.

But as the campaign gears up, other Democrats are warning that the past cannot be considered prologue. Top officials privately have expressed anxiety about the state of the president’s reelection operation. There was internal debate among party luminaries about launching the campaign in April, with fears that the pieces were not yet in place and that the White House needed more time for the transition. Chief of staff Jeff Zients had wanted Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the incoming campaign manager, to stay for an additional month in her current role as director of the White House’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, but was talked out of it, a White House official confirmed.

Currently, there is no headquarters and only a handful of full-time staffers in place, not one of which is a finance director. The president’s political team refuses to discuss its fundraising numbers in public, sparking anxiety among donors that the number is underwhelming and could continue to lag as the summer months approach.

And then there are the polls.

“The ABC poll, while it is an outlier, it’s also a warning, right?” said Terrance Woodbury, CEO of HIT Strategies, a public opinion firm with a number of prominent clients in the progressive and labor ecosystem. “They are a very confident White House. They are most confident in their record. He is a creature of the legislature and he believes that passing legislation is good governing and he’s passed some damn good legislation. But that ain’t always good politics.”

The concern for Woodbury and others isn’t that this White House hasn’t proven itself to be competent, it’s that they seem to have grown too self-assured. The assumption that Trump’s continued presence on the scene — and his likely ascension to Republican nominee — will cure a lot of the current ailments is a recipe for complacency. That is especially problematic amid an economy Americans still feel unsure about, and as investigations into the president and his family have the potential to further complicate the election.

“After 60 years in politics, he’s surrounded by people who are insular by nature. And so it’s not a huge surprise that the White House doesn’t feel receptive to messages other than the ones that they want to believe in,” said Stephanie Murphy, a former moderate Democratic House member. “It’s easy to blame the media but what is important is being able to listen to what the American people are saying to you. I mean, it’s not that every poll is wrong.”

Aides close to Biden bristle at the criticism and even the critics themselves, arguing their track record should allow them some leash.

“If you’re the sort of coward who’d rather throw stones at the people wrestling with the devil than at the devil himself, and who has no comparable record of success, it makes sense you’d confuse strength with overconfidence,” a 2020 campaign alum said. “Reporters aren’t your therapists, kids.”

Other Biden world officials insist they are taking nothing for granted. Though there is a growing belief that Trump is a shoo-in to be the Republican nominee for president, they don’t believe he is a shoo-in to lose in a general. They say that an element being lost in the hand-wringing about the state of the campaign is that a lot of the work is being done by a DNC that has been bolstered during Biden’s tenure.

“The Biden-Harris reelection campaign is building on the work of a historically strong DNC and state party operation, unified after the best midterm performance of a sitting president since FDR, and on the offense against a deeply unpopular MAGA agenda,” said Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz. “The pundits and Beltway media have always underestimated Joe Biden, and he’s proven the doubters wrong every time.”

Those closest to Biden like their chances in a 2020 rematch with Trump. They believe Trump is no longer viewed as an outsider change agent, but as a disruptive force, one a large swath of the country considers embarrassing. That Trump spent Wednesday night scoffing at his legal troubles, defending the Jan. 6 riots — pledging to pardon many of those rioters — articulating a defense for his infamous “Access Hollywood” tape and mocking a woman he was found liable to have sexually abused, only reinforced those beliefs.

“Fear is a good motivator and Trump rightfully scares the majority of Americans,” said Bradley Beychok, president and co-founder for the Biden-supportive Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century. “When Americans are reminded of the danger Trump poses to our democracy, that fear translates into more enthusiasm for Biden and the Democrats — including a deluge of donations.”

Fears about complacency, strategy, and overall political viability are nothing new for Democrats. It may be part of their DNA.

“Democrats are bedwetters historically. There’s like, just full-throated fucking panic,” said Jim Messina, the campaign manager for the Obama reelection campaign. “It is [also] fair to say that Team Biden has been the most underestimated political operation in the country.”

Messina, who says the White House calls him periodically to check on what he’s hearing and what advice he may have, believes that what some Democrats may read as overconfidence is actually just “a very small team of people the president trusts in who are calm and realize they’re going to go through 100 storms between now and November 2024.”

But the current round of internal party agita is unique in how Democrats are perceiving the stakes. Party officials have wrestled with the idea that Trump as the Republican nominee represents both political opportunities and larger threats. There is also an unshakeable fear that Biden is both inherently flawed (due to his age) and irreplaceable atop the ticket.

Four years ago, these calculations and concerns did not exist. Biden rode an anti-Trump sentiment to the White House along with popular anxiety about the state of the economy and the fight against the pandemic.

White House aides believe that even voters who may be lukewarm about now President Biden will still turn out to vote against Trump. But some Democrats feel the dynamics are different now. David Simas, Obama’s White House political director toward the end of his presidency, says that Democrats shouldn’t anticipate that Trump’s presence on the trail and the airwaves makes Biden’s path easier than it was in 2020.

“In 2016 at this stage, 18 months before, [Trump] was trailing Secretary Clinton by double digits. In the polling in 2020, where he was the incumbent, Joe Biden was getting into the race, Trump was trailing by nine or 10 percent. In the polling today, in a Trump vs Biden matchup, what you essentially see is either a tied race or a slight advantage [for] Trump,” Simas said at the Sedona Forum.

President Joe Biden’s planned Friday meeting with top congressional leaders to discuss the debt ceiling has been called off, according to a White House spokesperson.

The group has instead agreed to meet next week. No reason was given for the postponement, which comes as the White House and GOP leaders have just weeks before a June 1 deadline to strike a deal that raises the nation’s borrowing limit.

But both chambers of Congress are scheduled to be out of session on Friday, and there’s been little evident progress since Tuesday’s meeting.

The postponement was first reported by The Washington Post.

Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s office on Wednesday clarified statements he made about white nationalists serving in the military.

“Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?” the Alabama senator was asked during an interview on WBHM that was posted online on Monday. “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans,” Tuberville said.

On Wednesday, Tuberville’s office clarified those remarks to a publication in his home state, telling AL.com that Tuberville’s comment “shows that he was being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military,” and that the senator believes members of the military are “patriots.”

During the radio interview, Tuberville, a member of the Senate Arms Services Committee, also decried lagging recruitment in the military, blaming Biden-administration policies.

“We are losing in the military so fast” in terms of recruitment, Tuberville said, adding: “Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda, as Joe Biden’s agenda.”

A rise in white supremacy in the military has plagued the Pentagon for years, coming to the forefront in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, after analysis found one in five defendants charged in the insurrection had served in the military.

Tuberville’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

NEW YORK — President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has dropped New York City Mayor Eric Adams as a national surrogate following his public criticism of the White House’s approach to the migrant crisis.

Adams is among several lawmakers who were initially named to the president’s National Advisory Board in March but no longer appear on a roster of 50 prominent Democrats released by the campaign Wednesday.

But his case stands out.

The outspoken mayor of the nation’s largest city has in recent weeks pointedly criticized Biden over the White House’s response to the asylum-seeker crisis. New York City has projected billions of dollars in costs to provide shelter, food and other services to over 60,000 migrants. Adams has called for more funding from the federal government, an organized resettlement strategy at the border and expedited work permits to help him manage the influx. And as the expiration of a key border policy set for later this week grew closer, Adams amped up his rhetoric, most recently lumping the sitting Democratic president in the same boat with the congressional Republicans.

“It is not about the asylum-seekers and migrants, all of us came from somewhere to pursue the American Dream,” he said last week. “It is the irresponsibility of the Republican Party in Washington for refusing to do real immigration reform, and it’s the irresponsibility of the White House for not addressing this problem.”

Before that, Adams was sounding more like a Republican than the Democratic mayor of a city that’s long been a beacon to newcomers when he said Biden “failed” the city on immigration. He added that New York “is being destroyed by the migrant crisis.”

The mayor using his bully pulpit to push for more federal resources always carried the risk of alienating Biden world. With tens of thousands of migrants already awaiting the expiration of Title 42 at the southern border, immigration is expected to be a key Republican attack line during next year’s campaign. Having a Democratic mayor in a solid blue state — and a campaign surrogate no less — echo attacks from the right was bound to sow discontent in Washington.

A Democratic aide who described his boss as a “loyal foot soldier” on the advisory board had no independent knowledge of why Adams wasn’t on the list but said, “The relationship has soured.”

He added the Biden campaign likely dropped Adams because he was critical of the White House’s response to the migrant crisis. “That’s almost certainly what happened,” the aide said. He noted Adams “made somewhere between in-artful to stupid comments that were kind of out of bounds.”

The Biden campaign declined to give a reason for the change. Several other prominent Democrats including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer also appeared in a Washington Post article about the board in March, but were not listed Wednesday’s roster.

A spokesperson for Adams referred POLITICO to the Biden campaign for questions about the advisory board, but said that the mayor remains an avid supporter of the president.

“As the mayor has previously stated, he stands ready to help the president with reelection however he can,” the spokesperson, Fabien Levy, said in a statement.

Levy also pointed POLITICO to previous statements the mayor made in response to a question about how he might balance his support for Biden with his critiques of his border policy.

“Being the president comes with a menu of items, it doesn’t mean there’s not going to be an item on that menu that I dislike,” Adams said at a press conference in March, shortly after he was named to the board. “I dislike what we’re doing around the asylum seekers, but I always say that I believe the president is just a blue-collar president. I’m a blue-collar mayor. I like his policies. I think he’s good for the country — and it doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with him 100 percent on everything.”

Myah Ward, Joe Spector and Julia Marsh contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden made waves Tuesday when he acknowledged he was considering using the 14th amendment to end the debt standoff — before saying he feared it would get caught up in courts.

On Wednesday, the politically active constitutional scholar who warmed Biden to the idea called the president’s concerns misplaced.

“I don’t think there is any litigation to fear,” said Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, adding that he “hopes” Biden realizes a court challenge is not something to worry about.

Tribe’s response to Biden represents his latest effort to try and persuade the president to utilize novel legal arguments as a way through the increasingly thorny debt ceiling standoff. Tribe’s push for the 14th amendment first got on Biden’s radar vis-a-vis a May 7 New York Times op ed, in which he said the debt ceiling must be ignored in order for the president to execute other laws enacted by Congress.

Biden expressed openness to the argument at a press conference on Tuesday but largely rejected the idea of pursuing the option in the context of the current standoff. He noted that because the use of the 14th amendment would be challenged in court, it would spark similar questions around default and, potentially, market chaos. He added that he was looking at the idea after the current standoff is resolved.

“When we get by this, I’m thinking about taking a look at [it],” Biden said.

Tribe, in an interview, said that House Republicans — who have hinted they would challenge the president’s use of the 14th amendment — can’t sue the president for not violating the Constitution. He anticipated the Supreme Court would reject such a case.

“Even bending their standing doctrine, I don’t know how they or how anyone could find somebody with standing to sue the president and the secretary of the Treasury for spending the money that Congress has said they’re supposed to spend,” Tribe said. “What would a court tell them not to spend the money on?”

Biden on Tuesday called Tribe “a man I have enormous respect for” and someone who advised him “for a long time.” Tribe declined to say whether he is speaking with the White House about the 14th amendment concept.

The basis of Tribe’s argument is that Congress can’t issue laws requiring the executive to spend money and create debt and then also demand a separate dollar limit on that spending.

The idea of using the 14th amendment — which says the nation’s debts “shall not be questioned” — to continue making payments on spending approved by Congress has garnered increased interest as the nation tips closer to default. That could intensify if and when the current standoff ends, as White House officials have made clear that Biden is serious about exploring it as a means to prevent another spin around the nation’s fiscal drain in the future.

“The debt limit does not limit debt. It has no positive function whatsoever. It’s simply a formula for periodic crises,” Tribe said.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are warm to the idea but have been skeptical of embracing the escape hatch out of similar concern about a certain court challenge.

“I personally feel that we should test it,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the Democratic whip. But, “we can’t afford to go into a last minute court battle with the June 1 deadline.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), an emeritus constitutional law professor at American University, said if the standoff doesn’t end, “there is a pretty clear constitutional command” to pay debts. He also acknowledged there is “virtually no precedent” under the 14th amendment. But the president could be “in a position where he’s going to be forced to choose between either violating the Constitution and violating the laws of the country which require him to pay the bondholders and pay the Social Security recipients.”

However, Republicans — who are looking to use the debt limit to extract cost cutting — are opposed to the idea.

“Unconstitutionally acting without Congress is also not an option,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Tribe said he’s unclear how the White House could formally declare it was invoking the 14th amendment as a means of ensuring the country made its payment, but said it would not be a heavy lift.

“The logistics — is it an executive order, is it a directive in the form of a presidential statement? That, I haven’t worked out, and that I’m confident Stu Delery as the President’s White House counsel will be working rather hard on it if Congress remains recalcitrant and refuses to budge,” he said.

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy are still very much in the finger-pointing stage of the economy-rattling debt crisis. Yet some possible signs of life have begun to emerge.

Senior Hill aides have agreed to start more in-depth talks on government spending — though Democrats insist those are on a separate track from raising the nation’s debt limit. Biden has said he’d take a “hard look” at unspent Covid aid money in the talks. A top White House advisor is laying out ideas for energy permitting reform — one of the GOP’s biggest debt limit priorities.

It’s all far short of a compromise to bridge the mile-wide gap between party leaders, who have retreated to their corners since their Oval Office sit-down on Tuesday. Top Democrats are still refusing to entertain the GOP’s spending cut demands, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer castigating McCarthy in a bid to split him from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And Republicans are complaining that Biden is running out the clock.

So the minor signs of progress that are visible in the Capitol are leaving some lawmakers to wonder whether they’re meaningful or more of a mirage as the deadline to avoid a full-blown economic crisis draws nearer.

“[Democrats] are negotiating right now,” said Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), one of the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbents this cycle. “The question is, are they negotiating in good faith? Are they actually trying to solve this problem? Or are they trying to, like many issues and crises, weaponize it and use it against their opponents for political purposes?”

Democrats say they’re not actually talking tradeoffs for the debt, insisting that any fiscal conversations they’re having are strictly about spending bills for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. The existence of those talks at all, though — with Biden set to meet the Hill’s bipartisan leadership again on Friday — has calmed at least some of Congress’ rising anxiety.

“I feel slightly better, slightly, because they’re meeting again Friday. And because Mitch was so unequivocal: ‘We’ve not had a default and we’re not gonna have one,’” said Rep. Tim Kaine (D-Va.).

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) touted “positive conversations that are underway that will continue throughout the balance of the week,” adding to reporters that “I look forward to returning to the White House on Friday.”

Even so, Democrats are still plenty worried. Biden himself said after Tuesday’s meeting that he was “considering” something of a nuclear option in case he can’t reach a deal with Republicans: deploying the 14th amendment to invalidate the debt limit altogether. That suggestion infuriated Biden’s GOP counterparts; McConnell replied: “Unconstitutionally acting without Congress is also not an option.”

It’s partly McConnell’s stance — describing himself as in “solidarity” with McCarthy on Wednesday — that’s made House Republicans so confident in their posturing against Biden.

McCarthy himself stressed that GOP unity in a closed door meeting Wednesday as he laid out details of the previous day’s White House encounter to his members.

The speaker and his team also presented GOP polling about the ongoing debt fight, arguing that voters were on their side in thinking that Congress should find federal spending cuts, particularly given stubborn inflation, according to two people in the room.

Across the Capitol, Senate Republicans reviewed polling last week that similarly made them feel strong in their position, said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).

“People understand common sense. We need to return to fiscal sanity,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said of the polling data.

But illustrating just how far apart the two sides remain, the ultraconservative Roy accused Biden of “burying his head in the sand” on the issue, adding: “The president doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about the American people.”

The right flank’s hardline position is just one of many reasons that a final compromise will be so difficult to get through Congress. Conservatives have said they’re unwilling to accept anything less than the GOP’s conservative-leaning debt deal last month.

And progressives are challenging the paradigm that the only discussions on the table should be about energy production and cutting spending.

In an interview, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said that she wanted to remind Republicans that if “they’re serious about reducing the national debt, part of that conversation should be about making billionaires and billionaire corporations pay more to help support our nation.”

There’s also a question in both parties about how to judge when one side has blinked: If Democrats are negotiating on spending at the same time as Congress considers the debt ceiling, have they wobbled? Or is it Republicans who are watering down their position by considering something less than the blunt spending cuts and repeal of Democratic policies that underpin their debt bill?

Those questions have the Capitol’s dealmakers antsy — and prepared for anything.

“I prefer [a] clean” debt ceiling increase, said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas.). “But at the end of the day, we probably have to sit down and work something out.”

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday said he was “considering” the use of the 14th amendment as a means to circumvent the debt ceiling standoff he currently finds himself in with House Republicans.

But he cast some doubt on whether it could work, saying it would “have to be litigated and in the meantime without an extension it’d still end up in the same place.” The president said he would look at the issue of invalidating the debt ceiling through the 14th amendment “months down the road.” The amendment states that the public debt of the United States “shall not be questioned.”

Biden’s comments came shortly after meeting with congressional leaders to discuss the impasse.

Expectations that Congressional leaders and President Joe Biden might strike a deal on Tuesday to raise the nation’s debt limit are low.

Just how low are they? One top leadership aide told POLITICO that not only do they not expect much tangible movement today on closing the negotiating gap between Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), but they’re hoping the meeting won’t “devolve” into raised voices in the Oval Office.

Positions are so entrenched at this point, with Democrats insisting that only a clean debt ceiling increase will do and Republicans conditioning an increase on spending cuts, that the two parties will arrive at the White House for Tuesday afternoon’s meeting with almost entirely different premises. And the clock is ticking: The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that specializes in projecting the X-date at which the federal government will no longer be able to pay its bills without further borrowing, said Tuesday that the U.S. could default, in a worst case scenario, as soon as early June.

While all four corners of congressional leadership will meet Tuesday to discuss the debt limit, it’s McCarthy who will be the key negotiator from Capitol Hill. The speaker heads to the White House satisfied that House Republicans have already done their part, passing a package of spending cuts coupled with a one-year debt ceiling increase. Many of his House GOP colleagues framed the bill as a negotiating position for these talks.

There was broad expectation at the time of passage that the bill would be winnowed, through negotiations with the White House, to something that could win Democratic votes in the Senate and the president’s signature.

But with a narrow majority and mounting frustration that Biden did not agree to sit down earlier, McCarthy could try to stick closer to his House-passed proposal, which he clocked as a victory in uniting his conference. Some on the right flank of the House GOP, including Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), will view McCarthy compromising or departing from their bill at all as failure to execute on his promise to rein in federal spending. Norman told POLITICO last month that McCarthy made promises to keep intact all of the red meat spending provisions that the House already approved.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the other Republican at Tuesday’s table, has long insisted that he will not be the one to hammer out any deal, nor will he back any deal cooked up on the Senate side in a bipartisan “gang” by self-appointed negotiators. Legislation that could get 60 votes in the Senate can’t necessarily pass the House, where hard-line corners of McCarthy’s conference don’t want him to budge from what they’ve already passed while others only signed onto that bill with confidence that parts they didn’t like would be negotiated out.

McConnell is letting McCarthy lead, knowing that the speaker needs to strike an agreement that he can take back to his fractious, four-seat-majority conference. There’s no way around the House here, a senior Senate GOP aide told Huddle on Monday evening.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) heads into the meeting in alignment with Biden and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), intent on separating discussions on spending from a path forward to raise the debt limit. The Democratic mantra has been “take the threat of default off the table” to pave the way for talks about federal spending.

Beyond that Democratic negotiating position, Schumer holds another card: the House-passed bill that marries significant spending cuts with a debt limit increase wouldn’t survive the Democratically controlled Senate and would likely lose some Senate GOP votes, too. The Senate majority leader, along with everyone else in the room, will be looking for McCarthy to articulate some sort of flexibility to move towards something that could potentially pass both chambers, a senior Senate Democratic aide told Huddle.

Jeffries arrives at the White House with a still-developing relationship with Biden. For years, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) led the relationship between House Democrats and the White House, but Jeffries, who does not have the former speaker’s long history of deal making, is still building his rapport and trust with the president.

The minority leader described himself this weekend as being in “lockstep” with the president on the debt ceiling, but is expected to evaluate what role he needs to play in the meeting and ensuing negotiations based on where Biden and McCarthy take the conversation. Jeffries will be expected to deliver the Democratic votes needed in the House to move any kind of compromise that emerges in the coming weeks.

Daniella Diaz contributed to this report.