Biden changes tack on Trump
A year of ignoring the former president hasn’t worked.
For most of his first year in office, President Joe Biden has bet that he could move the country past the divisiveness of his predecessor by restoring a sense of normalcy to the White House, practising the traditional brand of politics he learned over decades in the Senate and as vice president — and largely ignoring the man he refers to as “the former guy”.
It did not work.
So on Thursday, Mr Biden put aside his hopes of no longer having to engage directly with Donald Trump and went aggressively at him, using an impassioned speech in the Capitol to make clear the urgent necessity of confronting Mr Trump — and Trumpism.
“We saw it with our own eyes. Rioters menaced these halls, threatening the life of the speaker of the house, literally erecting gallows to hang the vice president of the United States of America,” Mr Biden said from National Statuary Hall.
“What did we not see?” he continued. “We didn’t see a former president who had just rallied the mob to attack, sitting in the private dining room off the Oval Office in the White House, watching it all on television and doing nothing for hours as police were assaulted, lives at risk, the nation’s capitol under siege.”
Later, Mr Biden was even more blunt, even as he refused to utter Mr Trump’s name. “He was just looking for an excuse, a pretext, to cover for the truth,” he said of Mr Trump’s lies about election fraud. “He’s not just a former president. He’s a defeated former president.”
The extraordinary moment, in which a sitting president accused his predecessor of holding “a dagger at the throat of America, at American democracy”, marked a sharp pivot in Mr Biden’s strategy for dealing with Mr Trump and his promotion of the assertion that the 2020 election was marred by fraud.
The president’s speech tacitly acknowledged that his predecessor, far from fading away, remains the most potent force in Republican politics and a credible rival to Mr Biden in 2024.
And for Mr Biden, who throughout the last year has articulated the importance of promoting democracy over autocracy around the world, it also signalled his willingness to confront more directly the challenges Mr Trump poses to democratic values at home, which have shown little sign of dissipating in the year since a violent mob tried to block the certification of Mr Biden’s election victory.
The approach has its risks, not least in providing Mr Trump with better opportunities to hit Mr Biden with broadsides of his own — an opening that Mr Trump seized with a series of angry statements accusing the president of supporting “open borders”, “unconstitutional mandates” and “corrupt elections”.
But continuing to ignore his predecessor carries real peril for Mr Biden as well. Recent polling suggests that millions of Americans are at least somewhat willing to tolerate or support political violence against partisan opponents.
Mr Trump’s influence over the Republican Party remains strong; he is trying to be its de facto kingmaker, and he is polling as its front-runner for the 2024 presidential election.
Last month, the two presidents shared a rare occurrence: commending each other. To address vaccine hesitancy among many Trump supporters — unvaccinated Americans are disproportionally Republican — Mr Biden praised the previous administration’s work on vaccines, prompting Mr Trump to express gratitude.
Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist, said returning to a contentious tit-for-tat would only alienate Trump supporters the administration was hoping to vaccinate.
“We can save millions of lives globally, but when we tear each other apart like we did on Jan 6, the damage can be irreparable,” Mr Luntz said.
The president said “some courageous men and women” were trying to uphold the principles of the Republican Party, but “too many others are transforming that party into something else.”
Mr Biden said he was willing to work with Republicans in Congress “who support the rule of law and not the rule of a single man”.
Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary under President George W Bush and a Republican, said the shift by Mr Biden was necessary because Mr Trump’s false statements about the 2020 election and the assault on the Capitol amounted to a national security threat.
“Given Trump’s ego, it’s absolutely appropriate to look him in the eye and say, ‘I know what you did, it’s not appropriate, and it’s not going to happen again,’” Mr Chertoff said. “It was necessary for the president to show I am not shrinking from calling out what is going on.”
David Axelrod, a former top adviser to former President Barack Obama, said Mr Biden should maintain the same tone in the future regarding Mr Trump. “Going after Trump, who remains deeply unpopular outside his base, could be smart politics, especially if it draws him back into the fray,” Mr Axelrod said.
Even as Mr Biden confronted Mr Trump, there is little sign the address will change the behaviour of Republicans beholden to the former president and reluctant to cooperate with Mr Biden.
Rep Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, said in the days after the riot that Mr Trump “bears responsibility” for the violence, only to later travel to Mar-a-Lago to preserve his relationship with the former president.
Sen Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has been more forceful in his condemnations of the former president, but some longtime conservatives are showing increasing anxiety over Mr Trump’s continued grip on the party.
Karl Rove, a former senior adviser to President George W Bush, criticised “Republicans who for a year have excused the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol” in an opinion piece last week in The Wall Street Journal.
Mr Biden, with a slim majority in Congress, is struggling to unite his party behind his priorities: advancing a climate and social spending package bill as well as federal voting rights legislation.
The president’s approval ratings have been low, in part because of rising inflation and the pandemic, making the passage of his agenda even more crucial before the midterm elections.