Trump 2020 campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said Joe Biden's pick for a vice presidential running mate is incredibly important because it's essentially the presumptive Democratic nominee's "political living will."
Miller appeared in a relatively contentious interview with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, where he said President Donald Trump is "doing much better than the public polling" that shows Biden performing much better than Trump. Miller reiterated that Biden's pick for a vice president is a large factor in the race because the 77-year-old has refused to say he would seek re-election in 2024 should he win this November.
Miller, who was also an adviser to Trump's 2016 campaign, said he believes Biden's VP pick will help his administration "transition" to a younger, more socialist generation of Democratic Party leaders.
"It is consequential, and the fact that for Joe Biden, his VP pick is in many ways his political living will. He's already said that he's going to be a transition candidate onto the next generation. He's refused to say that he would run for a second term," Miller told Fox News on Sunday morning.
"So it really does matter who is picked, but the power center in this Biden campaign and what a potential Biden presidency would look like is the radical left-wing mob. It's Bernie Sanders, it's AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], it's Ilhan Omar, and those are really the ideas for the American people right now," he continued.
Newsweek reached out to the Biden and Trump campaigns for additional remarks Sunday.
Miller fumbled several questions from Wallace about whether the Trump campaign would accept foreign help in order to defeat Biden on November 3. Miller labeled it a "silly question" before saying, "the folks who have actually taken foreign assistance were the Clinton campaign," and referencing the Christopher Steele report paid for by Hillary Clinton's team in 2016.
"There is no foreign assistance that's happening in the campaign," he replied, before pressing Wallace on whether he would ask Biden that same question should he appear on his show — something Wallace said his campaign has declined to do on several occasions.
"I promise if get an interview with Vice President Biden I will ask him exactly that same question," Wallace said.
Miller repeatedly denied that Trump is doing any worse than what polls showed in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.
"It seems to me you hurt your credibility if you don't admit, 'Yeah, we're losing, and we've got to turn things around,'" Wallace said.
"No, I disagree," Miller responded. "President Trump's — the trajectory lines are going very well. I feel the campaign is in a good place. I think, in particular, when you look battleground by battleground state, we're doing much better than the public polling, which always tends to lag behind what our private polling is showing us. We think he's in good position right now."
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Benjamin Fearnow is a reporter based out of Newsweek's New York City offices. He was previously at CBS and Mediaite ... Read more
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