Trump gift-wraps Biden’s unifying theme
Former president’s insistence on staying in the spotlight has provided a subtext.
WASHINGTON — For more than a year, President Biden lacked a central idea for his administration.
In 2020, Biden vowed to defeat two scourges — the coronavirus and then-President Trump. He fulfilled the latter of those promises just by winning the election. The former became gradually less important to the country as vaccines and repeated exposure changed COVID-19 from an existential threat to a manageable illness.
That left the Biden White House largely adrift, responding to legislative battles, Supreme Court decisions and foreign crises with a host of policies, some successful, others not, but no clear message for voters to grab on to — a pudding without a theme, to borrow Winston Churchill’s phrase.
Now, thanks in large part to his old nemesis, Trump, Biden has a theme again:
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” he declared in his prime-time speech from Philadelphia on Thursday night.
“Tonight,” he said, “I’m asking our nation to come together to unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy, regardless of your ideology.”
Biden clearly believes in that message. It’s also true that Democrats see it as politically helpful: A majority of voters already view Republicans as too extreme on some issues, notably abortion. Biden’s speech sought to depict those extreme positions as part of a broader, threatening ideology — a drive toward authoritarianism.
Trump has helped greatly in that effort. The latest example came Thursday, just a few hours before Biden’s speech, as the former president said on a conservative radio program that he would pardon defendants from the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol if he regained the presidency.
“I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he said, denouncing federal prosecutors and judges. “It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to them. What they’ve done to these people is disgraceful.”
The emphasis on extremism motivates Democratic voters, already mobilized by the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe vs. Wade. Democrats hope the issue can also widen the rift between the GOP’s Trump and non-Trump wings, giving Democrats an opening to peel some voters away from the opposing camp.
“Not every Republican embraces ... extreme ideology,” Biden said, calling on “mainstream Republicans” to join him in opposition to Trump.
Republican leaders, of course, recognize that threat. They’ve portrayed Biden as insulting voters.
Biden should deliver an apology for “slandering tens of millions of Americans as fascists,” House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said before the speech.
Pennsylvania, where Biden spoke, provides an excellent example of Democrats’ hopes to win by portraying Republican candidates as extremists: Multiple polls show the Democratic candidates for both governor and the Senate leading in the state, in large part because their Trump-backed opponents have alienated swing voters.
In positioning himself as a defender of democracy, Biden can legitimately claim to have made some progress on his campaign promise of greater national unity.
Over the last two years, Congress has passed significant bipartisan legislation, including a $1-trillion measure to upgrade the country’s infrastructure — including roads, bridges, water systems and broadband connections — and a bill to pump $280 billion into funding research and building up the domestic semiconductor industry. In both cases, the measures achieved goals that had been blocked by congressional stalemates for years.
And by at least some measures, the nation’s divisions have started to ease since Biden took office.
Political scientists at Vanderbilt University recently developed a Unity Index, aimed at tracking Americans’ “general sense of faith and trust in their political institutions.” The index, which tracks measures of political extremism, congressional polarization, protest and domestic unrest and other data on division, plots a steady decline in national unity from 1981, when the data-tracking started, through Trump’s presidency. Starting with Biden’s election, the index shows a slight rebound, including a drop in ideological extremism this year.
Although “it’s way too early to say the country is out of the woods,” there is “some gain” in unity, said Vanderbilt political scientist John Geer.
At the same time, however, other measures have worsened. Pollsters at the Pew Research Center, for example, report a steady increase in the share of people in each political party who say that those in the other party are “more closedminded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent than other Americans.”
That sort of negative partisanship — choosing a party primarily because of fear or dislike of people on the other side — has become the hallmark of politics over the last two decades.
It comes as the U.S. struggles through a profound change from a majority-white country into a multiracial and multiethnic society. That demographic shift and the resistance to it from many white Americans have been the prime driver in widening the national division.
For now, the U.S. system has become “calcified,” with voters locked into party identities that they’re unwilling to depart from, as UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck and her colleagues John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch put it in a soon-to-be-published book on American politics, “The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Election and the Challenge to American Democracy.”
With the two parties almost evenly balanced at the national level, meaning that every election brings with it the chance of shifting power in Washington, that calcification “raises the stakes of elections — and makes them more explosive,” they write.
Meantime, at the state level, liberal and conservative regions are moving apart at an accelerating rate, widening the overall national division on issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, education and racial justice.
On both sides of the political divide, Americans sense that there’s trouble ahead.
A poll that CBS released Thursday found 72% of Americans called U.S. democracy “threatened.” Almost equal shares of Republicans and Democrats held that position. But each side sees the other as the cause.
Democrats cited the “potential for political violence” and “efforts to overturn elections” as major threats, and Republicans pointed to government having “too much power” and “people voting illegally.” Large majorities on both sides also objected to too much money in politics.
Although each party blames the other, both sides are not equally culpable. Trump openly sought to overturn the result of a democratic election he lost, and his supporters have embraced his lies about 2020 as an orthodoxy from which they will not tolerate dissent, as shown by the overwhelming defeat of Republican Rep. Liz Cheney in her Wyoming primary last month.
Polling last year by the Public Religion Research Institute found that nearly one-third of Republicans agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Only about 1 in 10 Democrats took that position.