UNLEASH JOE BIDEN

I don't know if you've noticed this, but Donald Trump is giving a lot of interviews these days. You probably know about the lengthy Time interview, but yesterday, while his court case was in recess, Trump gave interviews to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as well as to local Fox affiliates in Milwaukee and Detroit.

You can't blame Trump's campaign for pursuing this strategy. It seems clear that President Biden's team doesn't want him to talk to the media very much. Representatives of elite news outlets have comnplained that Biden won't give them interviews, particularly The New York Times, which has launched a vendetta against Biden because of this refusal. Understandably, Trump wants to prove that he's not afraid to talk to the press.

The tone of Trump's interviews reminds me of the name of a popular subreddit at Reddit: Confidently Incorrect. For instance, in Trump's Detroit interview, he offers a conspiratorial interpretation of a fake Venezuela crime statistic:

The former President said current President Joe Biden is allowing criminals into the country, particularly from Venezuela.

"One stat before we go. Venezuela was very crime-ridden. They announced the other day 72% reduction in crime in the last year. You know why? They moved all their criminals from Venezuela right into the good old USA. And Biden let them do it. It's a disgrace," Trump said....

We promised to check on those claims – and WUFT, a public TV station in central Florida, checked Trump's similar claims earlier in April, saying they were down 67%. WUFT partnered with Politifact to check on his claims and found them to be false.

Politifact notes that while Venezuela has seen a recent drop in crime, it's much smaller than Trump claims. Venezuela also continues to have a higher crime rate than other countries in the region. (Remember Steve M.'s Law: Not everything Trump says is a lie, but any Trump utterance that includes a number is a lie.) But Trump will just keep saying this. He sounds sure of himself, and most of the time low-information voters will never learn about the fact check.

I know what you're thinking: Everything Trump says is self-evidently awful, ridiculous, or both. To you, I'm sure it is. It is to me, too. But he's not doing this to appeal to us. He's doing this to appeal to swing voters. And if they don't know much about the subjects he's talking about -- if, in other words, they know about as much as he does -- all they'll see is a confident guy who can talk at length about the issues, making the case that he'd be a great president and that Joe Biden is a lousy one. His sense of certainty might be enough to persuade them. (Remember what Bill Clinton said after he left office: "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right.")

Now, here's an AP headline about President Biden:

Biden Keeps Quiet as Gaza Protesters and Police Clash on College Campuses

Biden spoke on the subject today, and the headline has changed ("Biden Says ‘Order Must Prevail’ During Campus Protests Over the War in Gaza"). But we're still told that Biden didn't address the issue for quite a while:

[Biden's] remarks, occurring shortly before he left the White House for a trip to North Carolina, came after days of silence about the protests....

Biden’s last previous public comment on the protests came more than a week ago....

And Trump has picked up on this. Here's what he said to Jason Calvi of Fox's Milwaukee affiliate about the possibility of Gaza protests at the parties' conventions this summer:

Calvi: You'll be here in Milwaukee. Are you worried about protests? We've seen these protests at campuses across the country. Are you worried that they're going to target Republicans, as well, in Milwaukee?

Trump: No, I don't see it. I do see a problem in Chicago for the Democrats, because they've handled things very poorly in so many different ways, and they have a person that doesn't even speak to the public. I don't know, has he came out and spoken yet? I don't think he's spoken about what's going on with the colleges and universities. So, I think you're going to have a little bit of a problem in Chicago. Maybe a big problem. I think here is going to be good.

I don't agree with everything Biden said today about the Gaza protests, but I think he should be doing this every day: addressing the most important stories in the country, speaking out, making news. The public needs to see him engaging with what's happening in the country and the world every day.

But his handlers don't want that. They're afraid of gaffes. Well, a few weeks ago Biden incorrectly said that his uncle, a World War II pilot, might have been eaten by cannibals after being shot down over Papua New Guinea. But that story is mostly forgotten already. It's been overtaken by events.

Even the much more alarming things Trump has said recently -- like his assertion in the Time interview that he won't intervene if anti-abortion states monitor pregnancies or jail those who seek abortions -- aren't dominating the news conversation, because other stories are seen as more important. So Trump just carries on talking. Biden should talk a lot more too.