The 2024 presidential race hurtled toward a consequential crossroads on Thursday, as top Democrats ratcheted up pressure to deny President Biden his party’s nomination while bullish Republicans prepared for a balloon drop to formally select a bandaged Donald J. Trump as their standard-bearer.
An extraordinary three weeks in American politics took another surprise turn, after the White House announced on Wednesday that Mr. Biden had contracted Covid, forcing the president into physical isolation just as his presidential candidacy hung in the balance.
A race that not long ago seemed a staid rematch came to a dramatic pivot point after a head-spinning series of events: a disastrous debate late last month that made longstanding questions about Mr. Biden’s age unavoidable, and then a shocking attempted assassination of Mr. Trump less than 48 hours before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
For a fleeting few hours on Wednesday, the two presidents presented starkly dueling images that fed into the very story line Republicans were unspooling at their convention — that Mr. Trump was strong and Mr. Biden was weak. One was flying to his beach house on Air Force One to enter seclusion as his party fractured around him; the other was welcomed as a wounded hero by thousands of cheering supporters, some of whom bandaged their ears in a show of solidarity.
“Teddy Roosevelt’s man in the arena has a name, and it’s Donald J. Trump,” Donald Trump Jr. told the delegates, invoking the attempted assassination of Mr. Roosevelt in Milwaukee in 1912 while he was campaigning to return to the White House. “There is tough. Then there is Trump tough.”
Two presidents have not run against each other since that race in 1912. And never have any two seemed to switch roles so completely. The convicted felon is now embraced — even beloved — by a party that spent years bitterly divided over his leadership. And the incumbent with a legislative record more accomplished than many of his White House predecessors is at risk of being cast out by his supporters.
For months, Democrats have argued that when voters were faced with the contrast between what they saw as Mr. Biden’s steady leadership and Mr. Trump’s chaotic administration, the country would choose continuity over change.
But with Republicans thoroughly rallying behind Mr. Trump, many Democrats now fear the opposite has happened, and are circulating increasingly bleak private polls showing Mr. Biden not just losing the Electoral College but also putting at risk states like New Jersey and Colorado that the party has not lost for 20 years.
The Trump campaign announced Wednesday’s theme as “Make America Strong Again” long before Mr. Trump survived a would-be assassin’s bullet. The contrasting image with Mr. Biden, fresh from a Covid diagnosis and gingerly making his way up, and later down, the short Air Force One stairway, supercharged that narrative in the convention hall — and, Republicans hope, for millions of viewers watching at home.
For Mr. Trump, the juxtaposition could not have been more politically advantageous. Here was a political figure who had struck directly at long-held democratic institutions by stoking a violent siege on the Capitol, refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and pushed forward with his presidential bid even as he faced criminal charges in four jurisdictions.
Over the course of the evening on Wednesday, Mr. Trump was lionized — supporters onstage repeatedly called him a “lion” — by his relatives, allies and military families as a heroic survivor willing to take a bullet for his country.
“My father didn’t just show his character, he showed America’s character,” the younger Mr. Trump told delegates. “When he stood up with blood on his face and the flag at his back, the world saw a spirit that could never be broken and has the true spirit of America.”
Mr. Trump’s party continues to embrace his convicted felon status. Republicans were selling shirts emblazoned with his mug shot on the convention concourse while a series of past and present advisers — including some who served time for criminal activity — circled the hallways.
Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s former trade adviser, received thunderous applause hours after leaving a federal prison where he had served a sentence for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who went to prison for financial crimes and was pardoned by Mr. Trump, mingled on the floor with delegates.
But the focus of the evening was J.D. Vance, the young Ohio senator, who studded his acceptance speech with a series of attacks on Mr. Biden’s age.
“Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive,” Mr. Vance said. “For half a century, he’s been the champion of every major policy initiative to make America weaker and poorer.”
Trump allies believe that Mr. Vance, who gained fame with his best-selling memoir of growing up poor in Appalachia, could help Mr. Trump win in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the trifecta of battleground states that both sides believe could determine the outcome of the election.
After his home-state delegation from Ohio cheered at one point, Mr. Vance jokingly chided, “We’ve got to chill with the Ohio love. We’ve got to win Michigan, too, here!”
It all added up to a reminder that a Republican convention that Democrats had once dreamed would provide them with hours of video clips showing radical Trumpism has instead served mostly to unify their opposition.
On Tuesday, as a parade of Republicans whom Mr. Trump had defeated in the 2016 and 2020 Republican primaries stepped onstage one by one — Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis — the rapid response account of the Biden campaign was stuck recirculating old clips of them because the new material all toed the pro-Trump party line.
Mr. Biden was flying back from a trip to Nevada when Donald Trump Jr. was speaking, after cutting short a campaign swing in Nevada and taking his first dose of the antiviral drug Paxlovid.
The Biden campaign, which since the debate has been struggling with major donors — including some who have frozen a combined $90 million to his super PAC — made what appeared to be an awkward attempt to capitalize financially on the president’s illness.
“I’m sick,” Mr. Biden wrote on X. Two minutes later, in a thread, he posted a second message that finished the sentence, saying that he was actually sick of Elon Musk and “his rich buddies trying to buy this race.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Representative Adam Schiff, a prominent congressman closely allied with the former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and who is likely to be the next senator from the Democratic stronghold of California, appeared to shift the political winds when he publicly announced what he had said privately for days: Mr. Biden should be replaced.
A cascade of leaks about private meetings followed: Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the two top Democrats in Congress, had each told Mr. Biden privately over the past week that their members were deeply concerned about his chances in November along with the fates of House and Senate candidates should he remain at the top of the ticket. Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chairman of the Biden campaign, told the president on Wednesday that donors had stopped giving to his campaign.
Mr. Biden has steadfastly refused entreaties to exit the race, but after congressional leaders privately warned of potential losses this fall, he sounded increasingly receptive to arguments about why he should step aside.
The president landed in Delaware shortly after the Republicans finished their program. As he exited the plane, he paused, waved and offered only four words about the state of things.
“I am doing well,” Mr. Biden said.
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