Over the past week, Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and allied operatives have bludgeoned Joe Biden over allegations made by Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer who says the president’s presumptive 2020 Democratic challenger sexually assaulted her in the 1990s.
Privately, however, Trump himself has remained wary of Reade’s story, expressing regular skepticism when talking about it over the last five weeks. At one point, the president even asked a close associate if the allegations were “bullshit.”
“He asked…‘Does it sound like bullshit to you?’” according to this person, who discussed Reade’s claims with Trump late last month. “The president did not sound like someone who was totally and uncritically buying into her story and he suggested he did not think this was the most effective way to [attack] Biden.”
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Another source recounted a recent conversation in which Trump, as this source characterized, “almost got to the point of [outright] defending Biden,” with the president making a point of arguing that the alleged assault didn’t sound like something the former vice president would do. According to a senior Trump administration official, the president had also told some aides in the White House this week that there was no need to publicly go too hard at Biden on the Reade accusation, at least not for the time being.
And when White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany briefed reporters on Friday afternoon, her comments on the Biden situation were indeed muted. “We are pleased the former vice president has decided to go on the record. It took him, what, less than 16 hours to follow the advice of the president and go on record and publicly address those claims,” McEnany said in her first on-camera press briefing.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on this story by press time Saturday.
Trump’s reservations on the Reade matter reflect a long-standing tendency of his to take the side of men of stature and power, as well as politically allies who are accused of sexual violence. It is a reflex, perhaps, strengthened by his denial of about two dozen different allegations of assault, harassment, rape, or attempted rape leveled at himself. But it represents a sharp contrast to the messaging war currently being conducted by his 2020 campaign and some of his top political advisers, who have been promoting Reade’s allegations against Biden more aggressively in recent days.
On Saturday morning, Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale still had as his pinned tweet a post resurfacing a 2018 Biden tweet reading, “It takes courage to speak out against sexual assault, or to step in to stop it from happening. If you know someone who has stepped up to the front lines of this fight, I want to hear about it.” Parscale’s quote-tweet of this says, “I nominate Tara Reade.” On Friday, the Trump 2020 “war room” Twitter account posted a new digital ad on how “Joe Biden and his supporters believe he should be held to a different standard than the one they set for others” on sexual assault accusations.
Those attacks have a slight nuance to them, in that they accuse Biden of demanding that women be believed when accusing other men of assault, most prominently conservatives and most recently Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh. But on Friday, GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel went further, tweeting about Reade’s case: “The American people deserve answers.”
To Trump, though, the answers point to Biden potentially being the real victim. And increasingly, the skepticism that he has harbored privately about Reade’s account has spilled out publicly.
“All of a sudden you become a wealthy guy, you’re a famous guy, then you become president. And people that you’ve never seen, that you’ve never heard of, make charges,” Trump told media ally Dan Bongino in a Friday podcast interview. “I would just say to Joe Biden, ‘Just go out and fight it’…I can say that I’ve been accused [of sexual assault and harassment]…As soon as you’re famous, you get accused.”
The president also said that “I guess in a way, you could say I’m sticking up for” Biden, but he added that Reade’s “mother was very compelling certainly, and the girlfriend, or the friends were very compelling. And certainly far more compelling than anything [accusers] had with respect to Brett Kavanaugh.”
Trump’s reluctance to trust Reade’s account comes even as several friends and associates of hers say that she told them about the Biden assault years prior to coming forward. Biden has steadfastly denied the accusations and none of the aides that Reade herself said could attest to what happened say they recall any such incident.
On Friday, the former vice president made his first comments on the charges and encouraged the National Archives to release any record of a complaint that Reade may have filed. But it’s unclear if the Archives would have such records, and Biden declined to call for the University of Delaware—where his Senate papers are currently being held out of public view—to conduct a search of its own.
Reade was reportedly in talks to make her own appearance on television for this Sunday. But she allegedly pulled out of appearing on Fox News Sunday following Biden’s MSNBC interview Friday morning.
Some prominent Republican lawmakers have declined to attack Biden or have even come to his defense. On Friday evening, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)—nowadays a staunch Trump ally and golfing buddy—said on Fox News: “I’ve known Joe Biden for 20 years. I’ve traveled the world with him. I've never seen him do anything untoward toward a woman, I've never heard anything about him being inappropriate.”
Despite comments like these and his own personal skepticism, Trump still seems poised to exploit Reade’s story, or at least use it to inoculate himself from attacks on his own history of alleged acts of sexual assault. On Saturday afternoon, the president retweeted a post by Dilbert comic-strip author Scott Adams that weighed in on Trump “sticking up for” Biden. Adams tweeted, “This [Trump] kill shot is so perfectly executed it is painful to watch ... and still funny.”
Later, Adams added that the president’s comments on the assault allegation were the “funniest” dig at Biden he’d “ever” heard from Trump. That compliment was also retweeted by the president.
—With additional reporting by Sam Stein
