Chris Crucial: Joe Biden channels Cersei Lannister

PLUS: The Arizona abortion law is no more

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1. Biden makes his choice

One of the central questions in this election for President Joe Biden and his team goes something like this: How, exactly, do you talk about Donald Trump?

Meaning, specifically, do you insult him? (Mostly) ignore him? Something in between?

This is not a trivial question.

Consider 2016. Hillary Clinton and her team clearly made a calculation that getting down in the mud with Trump every day wouldn’t work.

And so, even as Trump would question whether Clinton had a terminal illness she was hiding or allege rampant corruption that she had overseen in the White House as First Lady, she largely ignored him. She focused on the issues. On her qualifications to be president.

And, as you may have heard, she lost.

After that defeat, there was a broad acknowledgment among Democratic strategists that Clinton’s strategy, which was predicated on the idea that there was no way someone as loathsome as Donald Trump could be elected president, was deeply misguided.

The 2020 campaign was, in many ways, an anomaly due to Covid — and the ways in which the pandemic affected our lives and our politics.

Which makes 2024 the first real presidential campaign since 2016. And, because politicians (and strategists) are always, to some extent, fighting the last war, my strong sense is that the Biden people are determined not to repeat Clinton’s mistake.

That is, Biden has made his choice. And, in the immortal words of Cersei Lannister: