Ideology keeps Biden from triangulating like Trump
For anyone with sincere and absolute convictions on abortion, anti-abortion or abortion rights, Donald Trump’s attempts to reposition himself this past week should be somewhere between depressing and infuriating.
For anti-abortion advocates, the problem is the cynicism — the reminder that Trump is purely transactional in his relationship to their ideals, a lousy spokesperson for the cause of unborn human life, and a willing betrayer when politics requires it.
For abortion-rights supporters, the problem is the chutzpah — the man who did so much to overturn Roe v. Wade trying to disavow responsibility for its policy consequences.
But Trump’s cynicism is also one of his political strengths. What he does crudely, with naked calculation and comic transparency, is what successful politicians used to do more normally: triangulate between your base and the general public, make showy moves to reassure swing voters that you’re not just an ideologue, suggest that you’re willing to negotiate when public opinion is against you.
Trump often does this with symbolism rather than substance, with dishonest framings of his own record and promised policy innovations that don’t materialize. But still, he does it all the time, not just on social issues like abortion. The public doesn’t like his opposition to Obamacare? Next thing you know he’s promising to mend the program rather than end it. Middle-of-the-road voters seem uneasy about Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip? There’s Trump, Mr. Israel in his first term, suddenly sounding notes of caution and concern.
What’s nonnegotiable with Trump are his personal grievances, his amour propre, his election fraud narratives, his authoritarian style. That kind of intransigence is his major political weakness (in addition to being a source of danger for the country). But on policy, he’s always ready to perform flexibly, even if there isn’t a clear plan underneath the posturing.
This has long made a contrast with more doctrinaire GOP politicians, which is part of why Trump beat them in 2016 and again in 2024. But it also makes a contrast with Joe Biden. Not with the Biden of the past, who built a long and successful career as a moderate Democrat who could be relied upon to annoy people to his left, but with the Biden of the current moment, who still benefits from that moderate brand but struggles to demonstrate policy independence from his party’s activists.
In part, Biden is unlucky in the challenges confronting him: The place where he is clearly trying to triangulate, the Israel-Hamas war, divides his own coalition in a way that makes every possible balancing act anger more people than it pleases.
But his administration has also consistently missed more plausible opportunities for outreach. You see this on issues like abortion and youth gender transitions: Biden’s Catholic faith should make him a natural middle-grounder, but his personal qualms about abortion have zero policy substance since he abandoned his support for the Hyde Amendment, and he’s planted himself to the left of secular Europe on transgender issues.
You see this on immigration. Biden is only now considering a Trump-like executive order on border crossings, years after the border surge began.
And you especially see it on environmental issues, where the
White House is reluctant to put any clear distance between itself and climate activists. On energy and automobiles, Biden could be doing the rough equivalent of what Trump is doing on abortion: Having delivered unprecedented green investments the way Trump delivered the end of Roe, he could now be spending most of his time touting the
U.S. energy boom while promising the majority of Americans that they won’t be forced into buying an electric car.
Instead he has Pete Buttigieg, himself the kind of smooth-talking politician who should be good at triangulation, going on Fox News and comparing electric vehicle skeptics with people who preferred landlines to cellphones 20 years ago. “If you like your gas-powered car, you can keep your car,” is a simple, politically effective message.
Yet somehow the Biden administration ended up with, “If you like your gas-powered car, you’re a clueless antiquarian.”
One explanation for this pattern is that Biden’s White House is staffed by progressive ideologues who don’t have an instinct for moderation and don’t give their boss enough freedom to maneuver. Another explanation is that Biden’s team is just deathly afraid of the progressive impulse toward self-sabotage, the willingness of left-wing factions to sit the election out or cast a protest vote.
I don’t think the latter fear is ungrounded. (Ralph Nader cost the Democrats a presidential election, after all.)
But the Trump era has demonstrated the limitations of a base mobilization strategy for Democrats, and there’s a difference between being aware of your base and being its prisoner.
The greater freedom that Trump enjoys has roots in some dark places: cynicism, conservative tribalism, a populist indifference to policy detail. But it’s still a freedom that Biden sorely needs.