One day before President Joe Biden was set to descend on the Palmetto state for his second campaign speech of 2024, South Carolina Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn expressed doubt about whether Democrats and the Biden campaign were cutting through the “MAGA” influence — using a term associated with former President Donald Trump and those aligned with him.
In an interview on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, Clyburn said he had “no problem with the Biden administration and what it has done.”
“My problem is that we have not been able to break through that MAGA wall in order to get to people exactly what this president has done,” said Clyburn, who the president himself cites as a key figure in Biden’s success in South Carolina’s 2020 Democratic primary. That nominating contest is widely seen as the turnaround for Biden’s 2020 White House bid following concerning results in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Clyburn specifically pointed to student debt forgiveness – a topic Biden said on the 2020 campaign trail he would address in office – to make his case, pointing to the millions of dollars of loans erased under the Biden administration despite the Supreme Court striking down the president’s broader forgiveness plan in June.
“I'm still hearing from people as recent as yesterday that he did not keep his promise on student loan debt relief. And he has,” Clyburn said. “Eighty percent of what he said he would do, he has done.”
“They only focus on that 20% affected by that court decision, rather than what he did to get beyond the court decision,” he added.
Biden’s reelection campaign on Sunday, meanwhile, defended its approach to countering Trump and the GOP.
“But the one thing is that we're both aligned on the fact that we have to push back on MAGA extremists and the threat that they pose to freedom and democracy, and so we're focused on doing just that,” Biden-Harris 2024 deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in an interview on NBC’s "Meet the Press."
Fulks was responding to a question regarding a report from the Washington Post that former President Barack Obama expressed concerns to Biden in December over Trump’s political strength and the Biden campaign’s ability to counter it.
“Well, look, we're going to continue to do what we need to do in order to be competitive and in order to make sure we're growing the infrastructure that we need to win,” Fulks said. “President Obama and President Biden talk frequently, as do the campaign and former operatives from President Biden's administration and his campaign.”
“We're united in the fact that we have to do everything we can to push back on Donald Trump and the threat that he poses to democracy,” he added.
Clyburn said he sat down with Biden himself to express his thoughts on the topic, adding he is “very concerned” about Black voters showing up at the polls for the incumbent president in Nov. 2024.
Biden kicked off the election year with a ramped-up focus on his bid for a second term in the White House. On Friday, he marked the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol with a campaign speech in Pennsylvania in which he argued democracy is on the ballot in 2024. On Monday, the incumbent president visited the site of a racially motivated mass shooting in South Carolina for his second pitch to voters of the new year.
