Shortly after President Biden announced he was ending his re-election campaign, former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday afternoon posted on social media a forceful attack denouncing him. Over the next hours, he posted several more.
On Monday he woke up and started fresh. “It’s a new day and Joe Biden doesn’t remember quitting the race yesterday!” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social.
Even with Mr. Biden out of the race and supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, who has racked up a string of endorsements from Democrats and is the early favorite to become the party’s nominee, Mr. Trump has continued his stream of attacks on Mr. Biden, turning to a familiar method of communication and release valve: social media.
The torrent of criticism, in which he called Mr. Biden “incompetent,” forgetful and anti-democratic, followed a pattern that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, set in the White House. In lieu of a news conference or televised statements, Mr. Trump would often post on his preferred platform — then Twitter, now Truth Social.
In his posts since Mr. Biden’s announcement, Mr. Trump has so far not taken direct aim at Ms. Harris or other popular Democrats who have at various points been mentioned as possible options for the ticket.
Instead, Mr. Trump has fallen back on attacks on Mr. Biden that largely echoed the ones he has been making for years. Mr. Biden, he wrote, was unfit to serve as commander in chief and was “the Worst President in the history of the United States.”
Other posts dabbled in conspiracy theories. Mr. Trump asserted without evidence that Mr. Biden’s advisers, doctors and the media news hid the truth about Mr. Biden’s health from the public. And he twice claimed that Mr. Biden, who tested positive for Covid on Wednesday, never actually had the disease, suggesting the virus had been an excuse for Mr. Biden to exit the race. Mr. Biden’s reluctance to step aside after his halting debate performance last month — which kicked off a crisis of Democratic confidence in his candidacy — has been extensively reported.
Mr. Trump’s posts to some extent show the challenge that he and his campaign will face in refocusing their attacks on another rival after hammering Mr. Biden for years.
The Republican nominee has tried to fend off Democrats’ criticism over his lies about election fraud — and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot they inspired — by labeling Mr. Biden as a threat to democracy, mostly through false claims that he was leading the investigations that produced Mr. Trump’s four criminal indictments.
On Monday Mr. Trump tried to pivot, arguing that Democrats as a whole were anti-democratic because the party “stole the race from Biden after he won it in the primaries.” Mr. Biden, who faced token opposition in his primary campaign, abandoned the race after weeks of pressure from Democrats worried by his debate performance.
Mr. Trump’s posts were the latest indication that the relative restraint he had shown immediately after the debate was over.
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