Donald Trump is running one of the strangest general election campaigns America has ever seen.
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He's hawking Bibles, attacking judges, making billions in the stock market and boasting about his golf game. On Thursday, the ex-president traveled to New York to attend the wake of a fallen police officer – on a trip that allowed him to deepen his characterization of a nation adrift and plagued by crime under President Joe Biden.
But there wasn't much in Trump's busy week that resembled a conventional general election campaign – certainly not one that might address some of his biggest liabilities as he seeks a return to the White House.
That's a sharp contrast to Biden, who this week wrapped up his post State of the Union tour in North Carolina. The state was in Trump's column in 2020 and 2016, but Democrats think they can put it back in play. On Thursday night, the president put on a show of Democratic unity and invoked the party's glory days at an event in New York with ex-Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that the campaign said ahead of time had raised more than $25 million. Those big bucks could be critical in what is likely to be a tight race with Trump that could be decided by a few hundred thousand votes across a handful of states.
One attendee told CNN after leaving the off-camera fundraiser that the three presidents spoke repeatedly about the threat a second Trump term would pose, with Biden saying the former president would tear up the Constitution and alluding to Trump's comment that he'd only be a dictator on “day one.” Videos released by the Biden campaign Friday morning showed a light-hearted moment in which moderator Stephen Colbert contrasted Biden's busy schedule with Trump's golf activities, as well as Biden's warning that democracy is "literally at stake."