Lara Trump: 'People wonder, cognitively is Joe Biden OK?'

With Joe Biden seeming certain to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee, the Trump campaign is looking forward to unveiling a great secret weapon to defeat him, and the best part is, they don’t even have to do anything. 

Their secret weapon? Joe Biden himself. 

“I don’t even know if we have to do much, Joe’s doing it himself in many cases,” Lara Trump told Just the News in a podcast interview on The Pod’s Honest Truth with David Brody.

Lara, a senior advisor to President Trump’s 2020 re-election effort, didn’t mince words: “I think a lot of people wonder, cognitively is Joe Biden okay? And we question that every time we see him take the stage.” 

It is no secret that Joe Biden’s career has been filled with gaffes. Before running for president in December 2018, Biden even admitted, "I am a gaffe machine.” But during his run for the presidency, at the age of 77, the gaffes have now become commonplace. Even liberal late night talk show Stephen Colbert asked him point blank in a mocking tone, “Are you going nuts?” 

This talk of Biden’s mental health has clearly given the Trump campaign another layer of strategy in their path to victory in the 2020 presidential election. A few weeks ago, another Trump campaign advisor, Mercedes Schlapp, alluded to Biden’s mental health on The Pod’s Honest Truth. “There are issues there, whether he is fit to be President of the United States,” said Schlapp.

Now, this week, the president’s daughter-in-law is hammering the same theme even more bluntly. “It’s not lost on many people in this country that Joe Biden probably is not as sharp as he used to be, if you can even call him sharp at all,” snarked Lara.

Before that fall matchup up solidifies, the more pressing issue for the Trump campaign is how to keep momentum as the coronavirus rages on and leaves President Trump without his most valuable asset: the humongous rallies. 

“It has been challenging,” Lara Trump admits. “We certainly do miss getting all the great information that we do gain from the rallies.” The data they collect from those who attend rallies shows that 20%-30% of the attendees are registered Democrats, and almost 20% didn’t vote in 2016, she told Just the News.

Another challenge for the campaign is making sure suburban women show up and vote for Trump. In 2016, he lost the female vote by 13%, and since then, most polls haven’t seen too much growth in that area. 

The persisting gender gap has created a daunting mainstream media narrative that the Trump campaign says they are determined to overcome. They’ve employed Women For Trump bus tours, and just this past week they held a Women for Trump virtual town hall.

The campaign is quick to point out that while in 2016 only about a quarter of their donations came from women, in the last two years donations from women have risen to make up half of the grand total. “Our goal with our Women for Trump coalition and all of these events we host is to make sure that women out there in this country know that it's okay to support this president,” Lara said.

Recently, there’s been some encouraging news on that front. A new Pew Research poll shows Trump’s approval number among women has risen by 7% since January to 44%. Lara thinks the president’s numbers among women would be even higher if many of them would be bolder in showing their public support. 

“I think women are made to feel like they shouldn't do that,” she says. “So they're not posting on social media, maybe they're not talking to their friends.”

For now, the president’s daughter-in-law will try and fight the good campaign fight from her home in New York. The coronavirus pandemic has rendered everyone relatively stationary, and the Trump campaign offices are shut down, but she still gets work done from home, even with two small children at home, along with husband Eric and yes, her beloved dog Charlie. 

“We've been doing things virtually,” she said. Noting that “people are still able to make calls, she warned: “We know you are home out there, so you better answer your phone when the Trump campaign calls.”