Can Biden’s call for unity overcome Trump’s toxic legacy? Keenan,
U.S. President Joe Biden promises truth, honesty and decency as core values to help heal a nation. Will they be enough to overcome Trump’s grim legacy of the last four years?
WASHINGTON—So, in the end, Donald Trump signed an avalanche of pardons for cronies and criminals convicted of corruption, repealed his own swamp-draining executive order to allow his staff to become lobbyists, stopped on the tarmac to say, “Have a good life,” bopped a moment to the Village People and flew off into the Florida sun.
In the national capital city he left behind, the government he led was making a show of moving on. But it was just beginning to reckon with the situation he left behind.
“This is democracy’s day,” new President Joe Biden said on the steps of the Capitol after he was sworn in as part of a ceremony steeped in a tradition of pomp and circumstance — and one that in this case mustered as much pomp as possible under the circumstances. But those circumstances, if you zoomed out, didn’t exactly advertise the triumph of democratic expression.
I mean, in the end, the transfer of power, on the day it occurred, was peaceful — anticipated violent demonstrators didn’t show up in Washington to try to stop the constitutionally mandated inauguration from taking place.
But that was at least in part because the events took place in something like a police state. Or rather a police federal administrative territory (though the movement for statehood lives on in D.C.).
Biden’s celebration of democracy prevailing was attended by friends and family and the assembled elites of both parties who run the government. And they were surrounded on every side by many more thousands of soldiers guarding fences to keep “we the people” away.
It isn’t hard to understand why. Two weeks earlier, to the day, an insurrectionist mob had stormed the Capitol building, trashing it, costing lives and disrupting the attempt to certify the election. They had shut down the government for a few hours in a fit of rage at the election results. The examination of what happened made it clear it could have turned out as something more of a massacre than it did. Many vowed to return.
Clearly, the elected officials and institutions of the U.S. government needed to be protected.
Still, a city locked down behind fences, patrolled by soldiers, in which people need to show their paperwork to pass through checkpoints is not the symbolic ideal of a free and democratic society one would hope for on the day a new leader is declaring victory over the forces of authoritarianism. A little liberty was sacrificed to ensure a little security, at least temporarily, in the hopes that both might emerge stronger.
And that’s the challenge Biden faces, after four years of Trump’s America. He called for an end to “this uncivil war.” The entire city around him advertised the fact that brokering peace will be easier said than done.
Over his four years in office, and especially in his last year, Trump did generate — inspiring and provoking in nearly equal measures — an uprising of popular participation. The scenes of the empty National Mall and the streets around it at Biden’s inauguration seemed all the more surreal because over the past year, those same streets have been full of people marching and chanting. Women’s marches. Anti-abortion rallies. Supreme Court vigils. Gun rights rallies. So many anti-racist civil rights protests, amounting to the largest mass protest movement in U.S. history. So many conspiracist pro-Trump protests, demonstrating the rabid support of a broad swath of people for authoritarian fiction.
The massive upswing in the popular temperature couldn’t just be measured by bodies in the streets, but by ballots in boxes. The largest turnout for an election, in raw terms, in U.S. history. Biden got more votes in the election than any president ever. Donald Trump got the second most. People voted, on both sides. In the abstract, this should be a good thing, in the eyes of those who believe democratic participation is a virtue. And yet the high turnout also obviously indicated a high temperature.
Joe Biden won, and by a comfortable popular vote and electoral college margin. But in the American electoral college system, it was still a near thing: As Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic party in Wisconsin recently pointed out, if just 22,000 people in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona had voted the other way, Donald Trump would have won.
That small margin in a country of 325 million people isn’t that remarkable — Trump’s 2016 victory hinged on a similar margin of votes either way in a few swing states; George W. Bush’s 2004 victory hinged on 100,000 voters in Ohio, and his 2000 victory was won by a handful of heavily disputed votes in Florida.
Yet the close call in a few key places is a sign to Democrats and progressives that Trumpism’s defeat at the ballot box may not endure. After four years of thinly disguised selfdealing, trampling of constitutional norms, indulging racism, politicizing the justice system, sexual assault allegations, brutalizing immigrant children and documented lies, it was still this close.
After a parade of former allies and staff sounded the alarm, and after the House impeached him, he still drew more voters out to support him than any Republican in history — more than he did in 2016 before his term in office started. Though he leaves office with the worst approval rating of any president since Nixon, and the worst average approval rating over his term ever recorded, those who support him really support him.
And more pressingly, right now: those who support Trump don’t believe he lost.
There’s a reason that in Biden’s inaugural speech, he emphasized truth as among the core virtues Americans stand for — alongside cherished classics like liberty and democracy. That he swore to be honest with the American people. That in swearing-in his staff appointees on Wednesday in a televised ceremony, he insisted on “honesty and decency” as his only non-negotiable demands of them.
Trump led an administration of staggering dishonesty, of “alternative facts” as a way of life, of lying so comprehensive it generated a media industry of full-time fact-checkers.
But those who liked him believed him. His politics, inherited from a generation of talk radio and cable news propagandists, is an us-versus-them proposition. And for those who are part of his “us” through either conscious decision or cultural default, “they” cannot be trusted, plain and simple. Our guy must be telling the truth. Everything else is “fake news” and “witch hunts” and elite “hoaxes.”
Anyone who has attended Trump’s rallies, or logged time in the clichéd rural diners talking to Republican voters, has experienced a parallel universe in which Dear Leader has faced down a co-ordinated plot by backroom power brokers and “antifa” anarchists, and in which “radical socialism” and cities as active war zones are top-of-mind concerns.
The rabbit hole goes further: Trump has inspired a bunch of overlapping cults of conspiracy theorists. Many of them believe the election was stolen in a plot involving China and long-deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. An astonishing number think that the world is secretly run by a cabal of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities who are Satanic cannibal child-traffickers who harvest blood from kidnapped victims. Some believe Trump was literally sent by God to bring this conspiracy down and persecute the offenders. Many expected to see Trump rise up, somehow, on Jan. 20 and pull back the curtain on all of this, arrest Biden and all the others in attendance at the inauguration, and stay in power.
It is the convoluted stuff of a bad B-movie plot. Yet it is the conventional wisdom of a substantial chunk of Republican voters.
Trump actively stoked the untrue claims about election fraud. He refused to specifically debunk the wildest conspiracy claims of his followers.
And you saw the result of all that in the siege of the Capitol — the culmination of the politics Trump has fostered: an attempt to overthrow an election by the violent occupation of the halls of government.
In his first days in office — starting with a blizzard of executive orders hours after he was sworn in — Biden has moved quickly to show that he’s intent on reversing Trump’s actions on immigration, climate change and racial justice, and dealing with the active crises he left behind. He brings a legislative agenda to go with his executive orders, and he’s trying to get that rolling quickly too, to move on from and undo Trumpism. Those are mostly policy questions, which will face the usual obstacles of partisan debate and institutional obstruction.
But in taking on the job, Biden laid out the most significant challenge he faces as maybe his biggest theme.
“Unity is the path forward,” Biden said in his inaugural address. He seemed to recognize, in light of all the foregoing, that it was easier to say than to bring about. “I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days,” he said. But he acknowledged that the stakes were existential for the proud American system of government. A matter of being able to say to future generations, “Democracy didn’t die on our watch.”
Part of how he’s trying to do that is simply by making a show of reaching out to offer unity — of trying to work with Republican leaders who are expected to try to obstruct him, of trying to talk to the concerns of people who didn’t vote for him, of insisting that “disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war.” After four years, a president who tried to make simple public health measures and weather advisories bitter litmus tests of patriotic loyalty, maybe just demonstrating that not every division is a blood feud can accomplish some of his goal to “lower the temperature.” But of course Barack Obama famously governed on a “not red states or blue states but United States” mantra, and his time gave way to Trump.
Biden is also pursuing broadly popular economic measures like raising the minimum wage and distributing stimulus cheques, and tackling the pandemic. Success in those things might convince some who thought he was coming to take away their freedoms that he is not the devil they were told to expect.
But that isn’t going to win over everyone. A big part of Biden’s approach will also need to be acknowledging that “unity” doesn’t mean winning over or making peace with extremists — Lincoln didn’t preserve the union by granting concessions to the successionists. Biden called out white supremacists and insurrectionists in his inaugural. A functioning democracy may depend more on marginalizing them than on making peace with them.
Trump courted extremists, dog-whistling to them and goading them at every opportunity. Biden is shunning them while reaching out to the more peaceful people they presumed to represent. That much of the Republican party establishment in Washington made a show around the inaugural of stepping away from those fringes and disavowing Trump’s influence on them — after years of standing by his side to win them over — may be an early sign that the centre of reasonable political debate will, at long last, try to hold.
Still, those extremists will exist and be a threat. Still, the misinformation ecosystem will spread lies. The conspiracies may lose some steam in the face of failed prophecies, but they will likely carry on in some form. The solutions to the problems that threaten American democracy are not obvious.
What is obvious is that “unity” is a lofty goal that Biden has set, one far harder to envision achieving than an economic boom or even elimination of the pandemic. But no less important.
That is Biden’s task. That it is so daunting is Trump’s legacy.