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 him 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 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 cease-fire 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 that Biden is providing more competent and stable leadership than Trump did as president.
The academic calendar may play a role as classes come to an end for the summer. What’s more, a White House official said 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 part of Biden’s 2020 electoral coalition.
A survey last month of voters ages 18-29 found that the Gaza conflict ranked 15th on 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 Wednesday at a campaign event in Wisconsin, Trump derided the protesters as “raging lunatics and Hamas sympathizers” and called on Biden to “speak out” — accusing him of being “definitely against Israel.”
Trump 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 Tuesday on social media.
Biden’s stance is more nuanced and more difficult to explain to a mass audience. He says he supports peaceful protests consistent with the First Amendment but not demonstrations that result in vandalism, trespassing and other crimes.
Like the protesters, Biden says he believes 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 Biden spoke up for Israel in a speech he attended in recent months. 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 recalled, adding: “He didn’t smile at that. He looked at me intensely.”
Biden seems most at ease when he is decrying antisemitic harassment on campus. He is set to give a speech Tuesday at a ceremony commemorating the Holocaust.
Senior White House officials have been amplifying his message. Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, said Wednesday at an event in New York: “We’re in favor of the right to protest. But when that crosses into violence — when that crosses into calls for genocide, calls for Jews to be murdered — that’s completely unacceptable and must be stopped.”
Critics in both parties, though, insist that the Biden administration hasn’t been proactive enough in creating a safe atmosphere for students on campus. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., sent a letter last week calling on Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, to be more aggressive in investigating complaints of campus antisemitism.
After a meeting with Jewish students at Columbia last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told NBC News that Biden “has not taken decisive action.”
“He is the president of the United States,” Johnson said. “He has the biggest megaphone in our country, and he needs to use it. He needs to call out what is wrong and what is dangerous. I think he’s derelict in his duty if he doesn’t.”
The campus protests of 2024 bookend another set of protests that bedeviled Trump in the final year of his term. In 2020, Trump fumed over demonstrations that broke out nationwide over a white police officer’s killing of a Black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis.
Trump believed the protests made the U.S. look “weak,” and he wanted to call in the military to rout the demonstrators, former appointees said.
Biden, a candidate at the time, seized the moment both to rally Black voters and to showcase his temperamental and managerial differences with Trump.
Four days after Floyd’s murder, Biden delivered a live address from his home and then did a series of television interviews to condemn his death and discuss systemic discrimination against African Americans.
“This is no time for incendiary tweets. It’s no time to encourage violence. It’s a national crisis. We need real leadership right now, leadership that will bring everyone to the table so we can take measures to root out systemic racism,” he said in his address.
A day later, Biden left his home in Wilmington, Delaware, for just the second time after the Covid pandemic lockdowns began to visit an area of Wilmington that had seen some rioting during Floyd demonstrations.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
