President Biden’s positive COVID-19 test presents a bleak counterprogram to the spirited Republican National Convention, where former President Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver his first speech since surviving an assassination attempt on Thursday.
Biden has been quarantining at his home in Delaware, while Trump was hailed as a hero in Milwaukee after recovering from a shooting at a rally on Saturday. The Biden campaign has been running ads and holding press conferences all week to counter the Republican, but the president himself is not expected to make any public appearances for at least several days.
The race has been consistently close for most of this year, but some see the showdown as indicative of the two candidates’ night-and-day approaches to the election.
“This is a terrible day. If you take a step back and look at this situation, you see strengths and weaknesses,” Democratic strategist Van Jones said on CNN Wednesday night. “Bullets didn’t stop Trump, but the virus stopped Biden. Our candidates are being sycophants. Biden is being screwed by his own party. Democrats are divided. Republicans are united.”
Biden tested positive for the virus just before he was due to speak at a convention of Latino voters, a key base for him to win the November presidential election. Before being tested, he had been experiencing upper respiratory symptoms, a runny nose and a cough.
“I’m in good spirits,” Biden told reporters as he arrived to quarantine at his Rehoboth home late Wednesday night.
Meanwhile, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), whom Trump picked as his running mate, gave a lavish speech formally accepting the Republican nomination. Crowds in Milwaukee are now eagerly awaiting Trump’s speech, but his campaign says his remarks have been scrapped after Saturday’s shooting.
“No one understands the power of imagery more than Donald Trump, but President Biden seems less and less to understand that power. There is an obvious irony that being the target of an assassination attempt should be a stroke of good fortune, but the split-screen footage of the past week has profoundly changed the campaign,” said Stewart Verdery, who worked in the administration of former President George W. Bush.
Biden’s diagnosis comes at a precarious time for him, as calls for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to drop out of the running have grown again this week, and reports have emerged that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) are urging him to back out.
“If the Democratic Party is a football team, Nancy Pelosi is the coach replacing sick players,” added Vardary, the CEO of Monument Advocacy.
But some Democrats are hoping that surrogates will step up and mount a counterattack while Biden recovers.
“There’s never a good time for COVID-19, but Democrats have some powerful people who can fill in for the president until he recovers. Should we be worried? It’s on the list, but I’m not sure it’s at the top of the worry list,” said Ivan Zapien, a former Democratic National Committee staffer.
Biden’s representatives on the ground, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Sen. Cory Booker (D-MN), Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX), are holding daily press conferences with reporters in Milwaukee.
Just before Vance’s remarks on Wednesday night, the Biden campaign also released a powerful television ad narrated by Hadley Duvall, a Kentucky woman who was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant at age 12. Duvall argued that “Trump and J.D. Vance don’t care about women.”
But Biden’s health, which came under scrutiny after his poor performance in a debate late last month, was put under renewed scrutiny after he tested positive for COVID-19. The White House recently had to explain why a neurologist with expertise in Parkinson’s disease had made multiple visits to the White House, while defending his fitness to serve, citing a February medical exam that said he was fit to serve.
The president said in an interview aired Wednesday that he would only reconsider his decision to run for a second term if doctors told him he had health problems.
“If I were to develop some kind of health problem, and a doctor came in and said, ‘You have this problem, you have that problem,'” Biden told BET News’ Ed Gordon.
Since the debate, Biden has sought to ease Democrats’ concerns about whether he can beat Trump in November, and then tried to project leadership and call for unity in three separate statements after the assassination attempt on Trump.
But some say the COVID-19 diagnosis, capping a tumultuous three weeks, is a severe test for a president trying to change perceptions and prove he has another four years in office.
“In the three weeks leading up to the Republican convention in Milwaukee, the weak got weaker and the strong got stronger,” said strategist Bruce Mellman, who served as under secretary of commerce under the Bush administration.
Republicans appeared ready to point out divisions between the two parties this week ahead of Trump’s Thursday night comments.
“While there’s confusion, chaos and implosion within the Democratic Party, Schumer and Pelosi have met privately with Joe Biden and discussed how this is a problem for the House and the Senate, Republicans are united in response,” Rep. Elisa Stefanik of New York said Thursday on Fox. “It’s a stark contrast that the American people are seeing.”
