One of Trump’s oldest tactics in business and politics: I’m rubber. You are glue.

Days before the Iowa caucuses, former President Donald J. Trump will appear in court twice this week: Tuesday in Washington and Thursday in New York.

He was not required to attend either hearing. But advisers say he believes the court appearances dramatize what is quickly becoming a central theme of his campaign: that President Biden — who the likely Republican nominee describes as a danger to the country — is the real threat to American democracy.

Mr. Trump’s claim is the most bizarre and baseless version of a tactic he has used throughout his life in business and politics. Whenever he is accused of something – whatever it is – he responds by accusing his opponent of exactly that. The idea is not so much to claim that Mr. Trump is clean as to suggest that everyone else is dirty.

It’s more of an impulse than a strategy. But in Trump’s campaigns, that impulse sometimes aligned with his political interests. This way of thinking makes it more likely that the more cynical voters become, they will throw up their hands, declare, “They’re all the same,” and compare the two candidates on issues that the campaign believes will benefit the nation. Mr Trump, such as the economy and immigration.

His flattening moral relativism has underpinned his approach to virtually every facet of American public life, including democracy.

In 2017, when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly described President Vladimir Putin of Russia as a “killer,” Mr. Trump responded that there were “a lot of killers,” adding, “Well, you think our country is so is innocent. ?”

And in the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump applied the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” approach to a wide range of vulnerabilities.

When Mr. Trump was described as racist by voters in polls after, among other things, describing undocumented immigrants from Mexico as “rapists,” he claimed his rival, Hillary Clinton, was the one.intolerant.”

When Mrs. Clinton suggested that he was not temperamentally suited to be entrusted with the country’s nuclear codes, Mr. Trump said her stated ‘trigger happy’ and ‘very unstable’.

When Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Trump a “puppet” of Mr. Putin during one of their general election debates, Mr. Trump said interrupted: “No doll. You are the puppet.”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment.

For years, Trump has defended and revived the previously fringe “birther” movement, which falsely claimed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was therefore an illegitimate president. When he finally relinquished the conspiracy theory out of political opportunism shortly before Election Day in 2016, he falsely claimed that it was Mrs. Clinton who had started attacking the first black president with that claim.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas – “Lying Ted” Mr. Trump had called him — was a victim of this Trumpian tactic during the 2016 Republican presidential election, at a time when Mr. Trump was criticized for near-constant falsehoods. Mr. Cruz once In summary injustice in a fit of outrage, saying of Mr Trump: “He lies – virtually every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think comes straight out of a psychology book, his response is to accuse everyone else of lying.”

Now Mr. Trump is using his favorite tool to neutralize what many see as his worst transgression in public life and greatest political vulnerability in the 2024 campaign: his efforts, after losing the 2020 election, to halt the peaceful transfer of power. disrupt and in the office.

And his campaign apparatus has kicked into gear along with him, as he baselessly claims that Mr. Biden is staging the investigations and legal action against him. Mr. Trump’s advisers have come up with a slogan: “Biden Against Democracy.” The acronym: BAD.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, said he thought his former client was on to something. Mr. Trump is now battling Mr. Biden on an issue that many Republican advisers and elected officials had hoped he would avoid. They had good reason, as candidates who promoted election denial and conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol cost their party winnable races in the 2022 midterm elections.

Mr. Bannon sees it differently.

“If you can fight Biden almost to a draw, which I think you can, it’s over,” Bannon said in an interview, referring to the threat to American democracy. “He doesn’t have anything else he can throw. This is his main thing.”

Mr. Bannon added: “If Biden wants to fight there, about democracy and all these ephemera, Trump will go there in a heartbeat.”

It was Mr Bannon who urged Mr Trump to “go on the offensive” after a tape of him bragging to TV host Billy Bush about grabbing women’s genitals was leaked. Mr. Bannon helped settle three women who accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment or assault to join Mr. Trump at a news conference shortly before a debate with Mrs. Clinton. It created a disorienting effect at a moment of acute vulnerability for Trump.

“You have to remember something,” Mr. Bannon said of the Trump campaign’s “Biden Against Democracy” gambit. “This is the whole reason he’s running for office: to say he believes, burned into his soul, that the 2020 election was stolen and that January 6 was a set-up by the FBI.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump actually believes that January 6 was orchestrated by the “deep state.” His statements for that day have been opportunistically changed, and he was a relative latecomer to the baseless far-right conspiracy theory that the Capitol riot was an inside job by the FBI.

Trump has also tried to muddy voters’ concerns about corruption by, along with his allies, neutralizing his commitments on that front by attacking Biden’s son, Hunter, for making foreign money while his father was vice president .

But some of Mr. Trump’s advisers believe there is less to be gained from the Hunter Biden angle than from the Biden Against Democracy theme. They acknowledge that Hunter Biden is not the president and doubt that the issue will significantly move voters without creating a bond with the president strong enough to convince Senate Republicans, who remain skeptical, that there is a basis is for impeachment.

Mr. Trump has also privately expressed concerns about exaggerating personal attacks on the president’s son to the point that they could backfire and make Mr. Biden look like a caring father, according to someone who heard Mr. Trump make the comments.

In a 2020 general election debate, Mr Trump made such a mistake when he mocked Hunter Biden’s past drug use, prompting a humanizing response from Mr. Biden: “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem. He caught up. He solved it. He worked on it. And I am proud of him.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers hope to do more than address his obligations over his election lies and the violent attack on the Capitol, which Democrats are sure will remain deeply troubling for a majority of voters. They hope they can convince voters that Mr. Biden is actually the problem.

Voters’ attitudes toward Mr. Biden have shifted as Mr. Trump has tried to suggest that efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions are a threat to democracy. In an October 2022 New York Times/Siena College poll, 45 percent of voters who said democracy was under threat saw Mr. Trump as a major threat to democracy, compared to 38 percent who said the same about Mr. Biden. The gap was even wider among independent voters, who were 14 percentage points more likely to see Trump as such a threat.

But Trump’s rhetoric appears to have already changed public opinion even before the campaign deployed its new slogan. In another, more recent survey, 57 percent of Americans said Trump’s re-election would threaten democracy, and 53 percent said the same of Mr. Biden, according to an August 2023 report. poll by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among independent voters, nearly identical shares thought both candidates would pose a threat to democracy.

The repetition that Trump has consistently used in his public speeches is a core part of his approach.

“If people think he’s inconsistent on the message, he’s not inconsistent on the message,” Mr. Bannon said of Mr. Trump’s attempt to cast Mr. Biden as the real threat to democracy. “Go back and watch him hit it. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. It is very powerful.”

David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama, said polls showed Mr. Trump had “made progress with his base on this project.” But a general election, he said, is a “tougher” race to convince people his lies about January 6, 2021 are true.

It is “one of the reasons why he is so desperate to get the Jan. 6 trial past the election,” Mr. Axelrod said of the federal indictment accusing Mr. Trump of conspiring to defraud the United States.

“A parade of witnesses, including his own top aides, lawyers and White House advisers, testifying, followed by a guilty verdict, would damage him off base,” Mr. Axelrod said.

Ruth Igielnik reporting contributed.