Of all the statistics that came out of President Trump’s economic address on Tuesday night in Mt. Pocono, Pa., surely one of the most striking was this: He mentioned Joe Biden 30 times.
That would be 31 times, if you count “sleepy son of a bitch,” which the audience surely did.
“Sleepy Joe Biden — have you heard of him?” Mr. Trump asked at one point. At various other points: “So you have Biden food price increases … You know what you did during the Biden era for Thanksgiving? … I had a news conference, unlike Biden … Stupid Joe … Sleepy Joe … Crooked Joe.”
Joe. Joe. Joe.
Hardly a day goes by that Mr. Trump does not talk about his predecessor. Even still, his performance at Mt. Pocono seemed to represent some kind of new summit being reached. According to a review of all his speeches throughout the year, Tuesday’s was the one in which he mentioned Mr. Biden the most.
Mr. Trump has been in office for nearly 11 months, but his fixation with the guy who had the job before him has not diminished as time has gone on. It actually seems to be growing more intense.
An analysis of his first 50 days in office conducted back in March by The New York Times found that Mr. Trump mentioned the name “Biden” 6.32 times a day on average. At a cabinet meeting last week — 316 days into his second term — he spoke about Mr. Biden eight times during one 20-minute window.
It’s also notable that this fixation has become more acute as Mr. Trump has started facing scrutiny over some of the same issues for which he attacked Mr. Biden — namely, his handling of the economy and his age.
It’s like a rhetorical Chinese finger trap: The more that Mr. Trump’s troubles resemble Mr. Biden’s troubles, the more Mr. Trump talks about Mr. Biden.
“He’s like a bad gambler who just can’t stop doubling down on the same bet, and that bet was that cost of living and age was killing Biden,” said James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist.
The president was in Pennsylvania because his political advisers fear he may be making the same mistake that Mr. Biden made. He insisted to voters that the economy was better than they realized and that they weren’t actually suffering as much as they felt they were. Mr. Trump pretty much did the same thing on Tuesday, but with plenty of Biden-trashing thrown in.
Mr. Trump’s allies disputed the idea that he is a man obsessed, as well as any comparison between the presidents.
“The two economies are not the same, to say nothing of the two men,” said Kellyanne Conway, a longtime Trump adviser who worked in his first administration. “It is fair to remind everyone how bad things were just a year ago. Trump won saying, ‘They broke it, I’ll fix it.’ That takes time and persistence, both of which he is investing.”
“Exactly no one is obsessed with Biden,” she added.
Mr. Trump, who is 79, has continued to savage Mr. Biden, who is 83, as infirm and out of it on a constant basis. “You think Biden could do that?” is a frequent refrain. But these attacks against “Sleepy Joe” could land differently now that it is Mr. Trump who has been filmed dozing off during his own cabinet meeting and in the Oval Office.
“The reality is just changing on him,” Mr. Carville noted.
“He’s been president again for almost a year and the more things go wrong, the more he wants to blame Biden,” said David Axelrod, another veteran Democratic strategist. “It’s a leaky lifeboat at this point, but he still grabs on.”
Any questions having to do with Mr. Trump’s own stamina lately have caused him to lash out furiously. Minutes after he wrapped up his speech on Tuesday, he posted a lengthy screed to social media that began with “There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me!” It ended with him accusing The Times of “treasonous” crimes for publishing an article about his health and his age.
“I will know when I am ‘slowing up,’” he wrote, “but it’s not now!”
And yet, the more that Mr. Trump trashes his predecessor, the harder it becomes not to see some similarities. The tight circle of aides who surround Mr. Trump are even starting to sound like the tight circle of aides who surrounded Mr. Biden.
“It’s 7:00pm on a Saturday night and President Trump is still in the Oval Office working,” Steven Cheung, a top White House aide, wrote online last weekend. “It’s truly remarkable to witness,” he said of seeing the president doing his job at that hour.
Which sounded not so different from the sorts of things Mr. Biden’s White House aides used to post about their boss as they sought to refute questions about his engagement with his job.
There is an old adage about the power game in Washington, that if you stay here for too long, you risk becoming the very thing that you came here to fight against in the first place.
Dylan Freedman contributed reporting.
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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