In 2015, Joe Biden was considering running for president. According to Biden himself, the man who convinced him not to do it was Mike Donilon, one of a tiny circle of advisers who have been with Biden for decades. The president listens to him. And, according to a new report in Axios, Mike Donilon isn’t worried about his boss’s reelection. A “common Donilon refrain” is that “Joe Biden is a great president, and great presidents get re-elected.”

Whether Joe Biden is actually a great president, of course, is a matter of opinion. And Donilon’s opinion doesn’t seem to be widely shared. Most Democrats told pollsters they didn’t even want Biden to run this year, and most polls show Trump beating him in crucial swing states.

According to the New York Times, Biden’s three-person “brain trust” is made up of Donilon, Delaware politician Ted Kaufman, and Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain. And the strategy the three of them have crafted for Biden is to emphasize Trump’s badness — the exact same strategy, in other words, that Democrats have been pursuing nonstop since Trump came down the escalator to announce his first run for president in 2015.