Joe Biden Campaign Ridicules Donald Trump on Truth Social

Joe Biden's reelection campaign is mocking his rival Donald Trump on the former president's own turf.

President Biden's 2024 campaign has been ridiculing him over Truth Social, the social media platform started by Trump. On Wednesday, the Biden-Harris HQ account posted a campaign video alongside the message: "Have you seen this new ad, @realdonaldtrump?"

The video featured clips of various pundits describing the former president as "confused" and "not Donald Trump of 2016," as well as one of his primary opponent Nikki Haley saying that he's "declining." The ad ends with a soundbite of a news anchor reporting that "A person close to Trump actually says that he's rattled by Biden's efforts to get under his skin."

In response to the post, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek: "Of course the Biden campaign is promoting clips of Nikki Haley, because they know she'll be the biggest pushover if she became the nominee."

The Biden campaign created an account on Truth Social in October after previously expressing its intention to avoid the platform. Since launching it, Biden-Harris HQ has amassed about 82,300 followers. Team Trump has 136,000 followers as of Thursday.

The account, which has a bio that reads, "Just the facts, Jack. A project of Biden-Harris 2024," was launched "mostly because we thought it would be very funny," according to the campaign's post on X, formerly Twitter.

The decision to join Trump's platform has been seen as an effort to try to persuade voters over to Biden's White House bid and an extension of Democratic efforts to engage with voters who consume conservative media. Pete Buttigieg, now Biden's transportation secretary, made multiple appearances on Fox News to promote his views to Americans who may not necessarily agree with his political opinions, but also have not heard it from his perspective.

In their first Truth Social post, Biden's campaign said, "Well. Let's see how this goes. Converts welcome!"

Trump launched the social media platform in February 2022 after he was suspended from Twitter, now X, and Facebook a year earlier due to his January 6, 2021 posts that praised the actions of Capitol rioters.

"We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable," Trump said in a press release announcing the launch of Truth Social. "I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon. TMTG was founded with a mission to give a voice to all. I'm excited to soon begin sharing my thoughts on TRUTH Social and to fight back against Big Tech."

The ad posted by the Biden campaign also included unfavorable clips of Trump, including one where the former president says, "I stumbled and mumbled purposely" and another where he talks about being ID'd to "buy a loaf of bread."

When the campaign first joined the platform, Cheung told Fox News Digital that the decision was "finally acknowledging that Truth Social is hot as a pistol and the only place where real news happens," but that Biden's plan "to distract from his disastrous record won't work and they'll be ratioed to oblivion."

Biden has shifted his political strategies in recent weeks. Although he avoided saying Trump's name throughout the first three years of his presidency, choosing to refer to him as "the other guy" and "my predecessor" instead, Biden has recently been using his rival's name in his campaign speeches, including 22 times during his speech on Saturday in South Carolina.

Former White House communications director Kate Bedingfield told Axios this week that Biden had tried not to invoke Trump's name in hopes of moving the former president out from "the center stage of our politics," but that the president was changing his rhetoric "because now we are on the doorstep of the general election."

Update 02/01/24 11:02 a.m. ET: This story was updated with comments from Cheung.