Trump Lets Democrats Dominate the Public Debate Over Biden’s Future

Amid the flurry of Democrats’ questioning whether President Biden should or will remain his party’s presidential nominee, former President Donald J. Trump has stayed unusually quiet on the issue publicly.

Mr. Trump, rarely one to shy away from sharing his opinion, has not been fully silent since last week’s debate, giving a handful of radio interviews and keeping up a steady stream of posts and videos on his social media platform, Truth Social. But Mr. Trump has largely sat back and allowed the Democratic Party to dominate the debate over Mr. Biden’s political future, in a signal of his preferred opponent.

After months of relentlessly attacking Mr. Biden as too physically and mentally weak to lead the country, the former president has been content to let the news coverage of Democrats’ doubting their party’s leader take hold, according to two advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.

His relative lack of public comments on the issue also to some extent reflects his desire for Mr. Biden to stay in the race and his confidence that he can easily beat the president in November, one of the advisers said.

A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted after the debate and released on Wednesday suggested that some Republican voters agreed: 28 percent of them said they thought Mr. Biden should remain the Democratic nominee, an uptick from 21 percent in a poll conducted before the debate.

On Monday, Mr. Trump publicly dismissed the idea that the president would be replaced on the Democratic ticket.