Biden said Trump “may have committed a crime” and had endangered the country’s national security.
Wearing his signature aviator sunglasses in the Las Vegas sun and heat, Biden, who has rarely emphasized impeachment, avoided the issue Friday afternoon. But he forcefully denounced the president’s recent attacks against him and his son Hunter, declaring them “flat, dead wrong,” while asserting that his family could “handle this.”
“It’s not about me,” he said, speaking to a modest but supportive crowd at a community center. “We’ll overcome this. This is fine.”
In the week since the furor erupted over Trump’s entreaty to the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden and his son, the former vice president has toggled between searing criticism of Trump and a more traditional campaign message, as his team wrestles with how to maximize a moment that highlights both Trump’s unease about facing Biden and the delicate personal nature of the issue for the Democratic candidate.
On Friday, he also offered his views on health care and climate change, joked about how hot it was outside, posed for selfies with the crowd and even signed a baseball.
Biden’s denunciation of the president continued a week of stinging exchanges between the two, as the president has hammered away at Biden over his son Hunter’s past work for a Ukrainian energy company.
On Friday, Trump’s campaign released a new ad — part of a $10 million advertising push — accusing Democrats of trying to “steal” the election in retribution for having lost the last one. And he declared that Biden had promised Ukraine $1 billion in exchange for firing the prosecutor who was investigating his son, suggesting Democrats were hypocritical.
In response, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, issued a strongly worded statement, saying Trump’s presidency was “melting down.”
“Donald Trump is terrified of Joe Biden because the Vice President would beat him like a drum,” she said.
No evidence has emerged that Biden intentionally acted to aid his son in his work in Ukraine.
Biden’s return to the campaign trail Friday represented the start of a critical and unpredictable phase of his presidential bid: He is not only running to lead the Democrats against Trump in 2020 but also grappling with a national spotlight on his family and how to handle questions — and any potential political fallout — associated with his role in the Ukraine storyline that House Democrats are now investigating.
Trump has been regularly attacking Biden and his son over their dealings with Ukraine, often using innuendo and falsehoods. The president has also delivered deeply personal insults about Hunter Biden, seemingly trying to bait the elder Biden into retaliating.
How Biden handles Trump’s constant broadsides — as well as questions from reporters and voters about Ukraine, impeachment and his son’s business history — will be a significant test for the candidate who has topped polls for much of the primary race but has seen his lead dip recently.
“You have to be strategic and thoughtful about how you respond and when you respond and the nature of your response,” said former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who attended a recent Biden fundraiser but has not endorsed any candidate. “He has focused as much on the damage to the country, the concerns he has about misuse of power, as he has on the personal side of this.”
Biden advisers, who argue that Trump’s focus on the former vice president underscores his fears about Biden, have mounted a ferocious offensive against reporters who have questioned Biden’s record on Ukraine or raised his son’s business dealings. It is a strategy they say will continue; whether Biden faces doubts from voters over those issues will become clearer in the coming weeks.
Privately, some of Biden’s advisers and allies said this week that they would like to see the former vice president speak out more forcefully against Trump, in a way that channels the outrage of the party’s base and the resolve of Democrats in Congress.
After Tuesday’s announcement of an impeachment inquiry, Biden’s instinct was to be more restrained than some supporters would prefer, and he is far less eager to discuss impeachment than some of his rivals have been.
Some political strategists said that Biden faced risks if he failed to push back hard against Trump and that he could help himself if he used this moment to show he would be a formidable adversary in a general election against Trump.
“Is Biden going to take the fight to him, or is it going to be something more nuanced in an age when nuance doesn’t work?” asked Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist based in Boston.
She said Biden could not afford to dodge the situation, especially on the trail with voters. “He has to address it,” Marsh said. “It’s the elephant in the room.”
Even as he tore into Trump on Friday, some in Biden’s camp say that he will also continue to promote his policy messages, as he did in Las Vegas. But with Trump and Republicans seemingly poised to continue attacks on Biden and his son, his ability to stay on that message will face another significant test.
Biden is already under pressure from several directions: He faces intense competition for the nomination from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has been rising in polls and overtook him in a key survey in Iowa recently. He will soon announce his fundraising results for the third quarter of 2019, which will show whether he has momentum in the money race. As the end of the quarter approaches, Biden has spent much of his time at high-dollar fundraisers — which are covered by the news media — a decision that has taken him away from public events at a momentous time for his candidacy.
Biden, 76, continues to face concerns about his age from some voters who are eager for a fresh approach to politics, and he is often the target of challenges from his more liberal Democratic rivals over issues like health care and immigration.
Biden has been relatively measured in the past several days, avoiding unusual jeremiads or off-key criticisms of the president.
On Tuesday he delivered a public statement casting Trump’s overtures to Ukraine as a national emergency that transcends the personal nature of his attacks. At private fundraisers since, he has insisted that his family did not engage in wrongdoing but has also sought to keep the focus on the broader challenges that he says Trump poses to the country.
At a fundraiser in Pasadena, California, on Thursday, he mocked the president, joking about what a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president might have sounded like.
“It’s never been about me,” he said, striking a more serious note at a fundraiser in San Marino, California, also Thursday. “It’s a tactic that’s used by this president to try to hijack an election so we do not focus on the issues that matter in our lives, in your lives.”
By Friday morning, Biden had reprised the hijacking’ metaphor in a Twitter post.
The message accompanied a video that highlighted the false or politically motivated nature of some of Trump’s claims about the Bidens. Meanwhile, his team has been aggressively raising money online off the Ukraine controversy in the final days of the fundraising quarter.
In interviews at his event in Las Vegas, most voters said they approved of the more disciplined way Biden had responded to Trump’s attacks and wanted the vice president to remain focused on presenting his agenda for the country. Some said they were far more concerned about Biden’s age than they were about any negative implications from being connected to the impeachment inquiry.
Emily Anderson Shaw, a 46-year-old from Pahrump, Nevada, who came to the event with her husband, echoed the notion that Biden would be walking into the president’s trap if he decided to engage aggressively.
“I think what Trump wants is for him to argue, because that’s what Trump does — he likes to argue,” she said. “Don’t fall into it.”
Paul Glass, 67, of Las Vegas, said Biden was “playing it smart.”
“He doesn’t need to get into the dumpster with Donald Trump about throwing lies and lies and lies out there,” he said. “Put your thoughts out there — what you believe, what you’re pushing for the American people — put it out there and let it run.”
This article originally appeared in
.