Biden’s searing character attacks on Trump may tell a story about his own campaign’s struggles

CNN —

Joe Biden is throwing everything at Donald Trump.

The president and his campaign are blasting the presumptive Republican nominee as a criminal and a racist who was found liable for sexual assault and who is now being driven so “crazy” by his loss in 2020 that he’s been left “unhinged.”

It’s one of the most searing portrayals in the modern age by an incumbent president of his challenger and is designed to define the 45th president as flagrantly unfit for a return to the office he left in disgrace in 2021. With his two impeachments, a criminal conviction and an attempt to overturn the last election, Trump gave Biden plenty to work with.

But Biden’s strategy may also tell the story of a reelection campaign that is going nowhere near as well as the president must have hoped, as he battles diminished standing across swathes of the electorate and faces a dauntingly narrow path to the 270 electoral voters needed to win in November. New fundraising figures announced by Biden and the Democratic Party on Thursday reveal that Trump and his team outraised the president for the second month in a row, largely erasing what was a financial advantage held by Biden for much of the campaign cycle.

For months, Biden’s team has argued that when the choice between the president and his predecessor became clear to voters, the stakes of the election would shift the political equation in his favor. The theory was that voters were slow to tune into the race and that they may need reminding about the chaos and the discord of Trump’s first term that ended in the worst assault on democracy in generations.

But it’s now midsummer, and the election is less than five months away. There’s every sign the race is still shaping up as much