President Trump and his top advisers are trying to rebrand Joe Biden as a danger to America — with some aides admitting privately that the "Sleepy Joe" nickname will never gin up the visceral reaction they exploited against "Crooked Hillary" Clinton.
Driving the news: The emerging strategy is to claim Biden's mental faculties are diminished and say he can't rein in protesters' most controversial excesses, including toppling a Ulysses S. Grant statue, looting stores, burning buildings and vandalizing St. John's Church.
Why it matters: Trump is trailing in key states, and some of his advisers say they're running out of time to make suburban moms so scared of "Uncle Joe" that they'll vote for Trump.
- A growing number of Trump's advisers say their best shot is to convince voters that the avuncular Biden won't really run the show if elected.
"We need to be demonizing him," said a Republican lawmaker who talks regularly to Trump. The lawmaker said "Sleepy Joe" sounds harmless, congenial and low key. "Sleepy probably sounds nice to a lot of people right now, with everything that's going on," he said....
- In April's NBC/WSJ poll, only 25% of voters held a "very negative" view of Biden. In the NBC/WSJ poll of April 2016, meanwhile, 42% of voters held a "very negative" view of Hillary Clinton. Trump's figure is similar to Clinton's — around 43% of voters today say they hold a "very negative" view of him (53% were "very negative" on Trump in April 2016).
- In recent days, Trump has sought to cast a more sinister light over Biden, replacing "Sleepy Joe" with "Corrupt Joe," the