The Democratic Party’s unabashed opportunism would produce no political rewards if Republicans did not play directly into the president’s hands.
The Democratic Party’s unabashed opportunism would produce no political rewards if Republicans did not play directly into the president’s hands.
N o one ever accused Joe Biden of subtlety in his approach to politics. True to his brand, then, the president is set to embark on his reelection campaign with all the delicacy of a battering ram.
Biden will mark a “notable escalation” of his efforts to win another term in the White House this week with two speeches, according to the New York Times, the subtext of which will elude no one. First, Biden is set to appear at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania to mark the third anniversary of the January 6 riot. With the White House’s guidance, the Times reads between the lines:
The location, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War, is intended to draw a sharp contrast between Washington, who voluntarily ceded power after serving as the nation’s first president, and Mr. Trump, who refuses to accept the results of the 2020 race.
Next, Biden will appear in Charleston, S.C., at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to commemorate the massacre of nine black churchgoers in June 2015 by a white supremacist. “The venue embodies the country’s current fight against political violence and white supremacy, his campaign said,” the Times notes.
The paper sounds a note of exhaustion with the Biden campaign’s heavy-handed dramaturgy. These speeches are “part of an effort to redirect attention” from the president’s lackluster polls and refocus Democrats on the unpalatability of Donald Trump, the Times observed. Indeed, these speeches may have that very effect. Or, at least, they might accelerate a process that political physics would render inevitable if (or, perhaps, when) Trump secures the Republican presidential nomination.
But expressing just a hint of fatigue with the “threat to democracy” narrative surrounding Trump is savvy. Biden’s proposed speeches do run the risk of commodifying and thereby cheapening widespread concerns about Trump’s commitment to preserving American democracy and national comity. The notion that the 45th president represents a singular threat to democratic institutions and presidential norms has eroded over the course of the Biden administration when the president and his party decided to get in on that very same game. And yet, the White House has every reason to believe the risk that this maneuver will backfire on Biden is minimal. After all, it hasn’t yet.
Biden made a mockery of himself in September 2022 when he adorned himself in the apolitical trappings of the presidency and delivered a political stump speech before Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Flanked by the building’s façade bathed in blood-red light, the president issued an omnidirectional political attack on “MAGA forces,” the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, insurrectionary elements on the American Right, and average Republican voters who oppose his policy preferences.
The president’s objective was to elide the distinctions between these disparate constituencies — an act of grotesque irresponsibility from someone ostensibly alarmed by what he also claimed was a small contingent of genuinely illiberal elements. The speech was not well received. But who is to say that it didn’t have its intended effect? After all, what feature is shared across the range of Republican candidates who underperformed in what should have been a strong Republican midterm-election cycle but their fealty to the notion that the 2020 election was somehow wrongly decided?
Biden went back to that well on January 6, 2023, in what Politico previewed as a “solemn tribute” to the day’s events and a “warning” about “the danger and chaos posed by election deniers.” In ceremonies at the White House and the Capitol, Biden awarded a variety of civilian honors to police, election workers, and other officials for their service during the 2020 election and the transfer of power. The president also used the opportunity to assail the “mob of insurrectionists” who were moved to violence “by lies about the 2020 election.”
The maneuver was attacked by former Representative Kevin McCarthy as an effort to “divide the country.” Senator Lindsay Graham savaged the “brazen politicization of January 6 by President Biden.” The New York Post’s James Bovard railed against the Democratic president’s attempt to transform January 6 into “a national anti-Republican holiday,” which perhaps explains why most GOP lawmakers kept their distance from the day’s remembrance.
These criticisms of Biden’s conduct are perfectly valid, but the Democratic Party’s unabashed opportunism would produce no political rewards if Republicans did not play directly into the president’s hands.
I do wish it could go without saying, but it unfortunately cannot: Americans do not like what happened on January 6. The polling is clear. The voting public does not believe that the threat represented by the January 6 riots has been overhyped. They don’t think a nefarious cabal of FBI agents and Antifa agitators conspired to frame the MAGA movement for the day’s events. They don’t think Donald Trump can be absolved of his role in what transpired. Perhaps most of all, they don’t want to see what happened on January 6 ever happen again.
If the polling is to be believed, Republicans are the exception to the rule. Their attachment to Trump has increased in the intervening years, as has their desire to rehabilitate the rioters. The most recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll not only confirmed that Republican voters have gravitated toward Trump in direct proportionality to the legal jeopardy he faces but also that the rank-and-file GOP are increasingly apt to embrace Trump’s dubious narratives around January 6. “In follow-up interviews, some said their views have changed because they now believe the riot was instigated by law enforcement to suppress political dissent,” the Post subsequently reported.
Many Republicans insist they want to “move on” from January 6, but they wouldn’t so doggedly relitigate the day’s events if they did. At the very least, they would recognize that engaging in that enterprise is to fight on terrain of the Democratic Party’s choosing. If the goal of Biden’s cynical agitation was to use elementary reverse psychology to guide Republicans into endorsing views that are anathema to most American voters, mission accomplished.
Biden and his fellow Democrats could not be any clearer about whom they want to run against next November. Republican voters seem inclined to oblige Democrats over and over and over again. It’s reasonable to expect that, at some point, Republicans would begin to resent the psychological manipulation to which they’re being subjected and stop responding predictably to it. From our present vantage, however, that point seems a long way off.