Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney predicted President Trump will face a tough reelection battle if it becomes a “referendum” on himself.
Instead, Mulvaney, who is now the U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland, told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday that the president’s best campaign strategy is to draw contrasts between himself and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
“One of the things you do is to point out to people that you made America great, to use his term in the first place, you can do it again,” he explained, responding to a question about the president’s messaging. “If Joe Biden has a history of anything, it’s not being able to get the country out of a slow economy, that eight years under President Obama and Vice President Biden to do that and it didn’t work. So if the president can go back to drawing those contrasts between him and Joe Biden, that becomes a race between Trump and Biden, I think the president does extraordinarily well. He shows people, look if you hire me, this is what you get, if you hire him, you end up with no jobs.”
“If it ends up being a popularity contest or worse, a referendum on President Trump, I think he’s got some real headwinds to face,” Mulvaney added.
Trump lags behind Biden in many national polls with there being about four months until Election Day, and his administration has been put to the test with the deadly coronavirus pandemic, the subsequent economic stumble, and social unrest following the death of George Floyd.
