The New York Times reported on Joe Biden putting Donald Trump in his place
Is Donald Trump the Fate of the U.S.? Commentary on Biden in the Light of the 2024 Midterm Election
Biden has set himself the challenge of getting the country out of its shell, in the face of Trump. This is not, despite the fatalism of people like Romney, a doomed project. Congress’s Jan. 6 hearings demonstrated that a sustained focus on Trump’s wrongdoing can move at least some fraction of the public. Right now, the ex-president benefits from being largely out of the spotlight — his ejection from Twitter has, ironically, been a great boon to him — but the more Trump is in people’s faces, the less they like him. (That’s why his Covid news conferences were so disastrous for him.) Many of us would rather not think about a man like that, so it is important for Biden to try to make people pay attention.
The sick [expletive] in question is, naturally, Donald Trump, Mr. Biden’s predecessor and the likely Republican nominee for the third straight time. Just before the aside, Mr. Biden had deplored how the former president not only encourages political violence but makes a joke of it, as he did after a deranged man broke into former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home in 2022 and beat her husband, Paul, with a hammer. The man had been looking for Ms. Pelosi, using the same language the Jan. 6 insurrectionists did when, incited by Mr. Trump, they stormed the Capitol three years ago.
Before last week, Mr. Biden had mostly managed to avoid talking about the former president — a wise move, all things considered. Mr. Trump’s chaotic four years in office exhausted everyone, including many of his own followers. Mr. Biden would refer to his predecessor as “the former guy,” and try to switch the conversation to a more promising future rather than dwelling on the past. He promised in 2020 to return to normal life, and he has succeeded in that.
That’s fundamentally what the 2024 election is about. Romney seems to agree with Biden that there is a danger of another Trump presidency, but he is worried that the future of American self-government can’t be made to care about.
This fear could easily become self-fulfilling, as commentators treat Trump’s plot against America as a given instead of a major, still-unfolding story. On Saturday, CNN’s Chris Wallace analyzed Biden’s speech, in which the president noted, correctly, that Trump’s rhetoric about migrants echoed “the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” Wallace asked if the panelist was smart to go after Trump hard. Is Biden’s warning about his predecessor accurate? It is still apt that the #Resistanceera warning against normalizing Trump is hokey. The alternative is to allow Trump to redefine what is shocking and wrong in American politics.
Biden gave his second speech of the year at the site of a racist mass murder in Charleston on Monday. It was ostensibly about white supremacy, but its real theme was truth, and the way historical fictions from the Lost Cause of the Confederate South to Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election license tyranny and oppression.
