WASHINGTON — Joe Biden’s advisers believe that tensions over U.S. support for Israel in the war in Gaza spreading through college campuses will soon flame out and that there is neither a need nor an upside for the president to weigh in more directly.
For now, Biden is taking a hands-off posture toward the unrest and has no plans to step up his involvement in escalating clashes between police and protesters, White House and campaign advisers said, even as Donald Trump looks to capitalize on the issue.
Biden’s view is that it’s up to university leaders to decide how to cope with campus demonstrations that are emerging as the latest flashpoint in the 2024 presidential race, advisers said. In keeping with that approach, he didn’t intervene or publicly object as police swept onto the Columbia University campus Tuesday night and arrested about 230 protesters, including about 40 who’d seized a building and erected an encampment calling attention to their demand for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Inside the Biden re-election effort, advisers seem hopeful that the protests won’t distract from their message that the economy is improving and the president is providing more competent and stable leadership than took place under Trump.
The academic calendar may play a role as classes come to an end for the summer. What’s more, a White House official noted that the overall number of protesters is relatively small and that the war between Israel and Hamas is far from a top-of-mind concern of young voters, who were a key piece of Biden’s 2020 electoral coalition.
A survey last month of voters aged 18-29 found that the Gaza conflict ranked 15th in their list of important issues, the official noted.
Trump’s political operation sees an opening, however. Corey Lewandowski, a consultant to the Republican National Committee who previously worked for Trump, said in an interview: “This is not good for the young vote for Biden. Historically, the Democrats have outperformed Republicans among younger voters. If it is perceived that Joe Biden is soft, meaning not standing up to the people who are protesting, it’s going to hurt him.”
Speaking at a campaign event in Wisconsin on Wednesday, Trump derided the protesters as “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers,” and called on Biden to “speak out” — accusing him of being “definitely against Israel.”
The ex-president also took aim at Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, one of the university leaders whom Biden is deferring to as the campus protests unfold.
In a reference to the school, Trump said “The person that heads it up — a woman — she waited so long. She was so weak. She was so afraid. She was so bad.”
A Biden adviser said: “Donald Trump has repeatedly fanned the flames and encouraged civil unrest as a political strategy, and it has repeatedly failed to be effective.”
The campus protests pose a dilemma for Biden as the pace of the general election campaign quickens. Trump’s stance is simple enough for a bumper sticker: “People have to respect law and order in this country,” he wrote in a social media post on Tuesday.
Biden’s stance is more nuanced, more difficult to explain to a mass audience. He supports peaceful protests consistent with the First Amendment, but not demonstrations that result in vandalism, trespassing and other crimes.
Like the protesters, Biden believes that Israel has inflicted too much carnage in Gaza. Unlike some of them, he defends Israel’s sovereignty and recoils at the notion of Jews losing a homeland.
Alan Kessler, a Democratic fundraiser who is Jewish, said he attended a speech in recent months in which Biden spoke up for Israel. As they chatted afterward and Kessler praised the address, Biden told him: “‘That wasn’t a speech; that came from the heart. That’s what I truly believe.’ He didn’t smile at that. He looked at me intensely,” Kessler recalled.
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