When former President Donald Trump has a beef with someone, it's almost inevitable he will call that person a "loser" or a "stone cold loser."
Now, President Biden is turning one of his predecessor's favorite insults against him, using his first two campaign speeches of the year to pointedly label Trump a loser.
"Losers are taught to concede when they lose," Biden said on Monday, noting that Trump violated a basic principle of American democracy by refusing to concede the 2020 election. "And he's a loser."
The South Carolina audience broke out into laughter and applause — just as a Pennsylvania crowd did a few days earlier after Biden discussed Trump's failed efforts to challenge the election results in court.
"The legal path just took Trump back to the truth — that I had won the election, and he was a loser," said Biden.
Biden and his campaign expect Trump to win the Republican nominating contest, which kicks off Monday in Iowa. A core part of Biden's campaign strategy is to call out Trump for the threat he poses to democracy. Trump's lies about the election being stolen drove the January 6th insurrection.
But long before that, Trump revealed at a 2019 rally how he felt about being associated with losing. "I never want to be called a loser," Trump said.
Christie called Trump a loser, too. Then he dropped out of the race
Biden's not the first political opponent to call Trump a loser. It was a feature of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's campaign for the Republican primary.
"He is a three-time loser," Christie said in a Fox News interview over the summer, referring to the 2020 election, and the midterms in 2018 and 2022 where Trump-backed candidates did poorly. "We don't want to have a four-time loser."
In the end, it was Christie who lost. He dropped out of the race earlier this week.
Calling Trump a loser "hurts his brand," said Mike DuHaime, a political consultant who has long advised Christie. "Part of the reason that he gets support is because he's seen as a winner. And when you can actually chip away at that, it hurts his brand."
DuHaime conceded that Trump continues to maintain a winning brand despite a long line of losses both in politics and business. But he said there's another reason Christie deployed the insult.
"It just drives him crazy," said DuHaime. "And when people tell him he's a loser, it hurts. He also knows it's true, so it hurts even more at times."
The former president has not publicly responded to Biden's loser taunt — though he did falsely say that Biden stuttered in his first speech, and mocked him.
So why is Biden borrowing Trump's favorite insult?
Schoolyard taunts aren't really part of Biden's brand.
But in a campaign where some voters may have forgotten the chaos that ensued when Trump tried to overturn the results of the election, using the word "loser" is another way to remind them.
"It may be a point of pain for him, but it's a point of truth for the United States of America and our American democracy," said Michael Tyler, the campaign's communications director.
When asked directly whether it was "a troll," Tyler smiled. "It's simply the truth," he said.
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