How the Ex-President and the Democratic Party are Doomed to Get Out of the Country in the Face of a Dark Side of the Trump Era
The Biden has set himself the job of trying to get out of the country’s way in the face of Trump. This is a doomed project, despite Romney’s fatalism. The hearings on Trump’s wrongdoing demonstrated that a constant focus on his wrongdoing can affect a small amount 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. His Covid news conferences were so bad for him because of that. It’s thus incumbent on Biden to try to make people pay attention to a man many of us would rather never think about again.
Donald Trump is 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 was looking for Ms. Pelosi, just like when the insurrectionists went to the Capitol three years ago.
Last week, Mr. Biden began talking about the former president and it was a wise move. Mr. Trump’s chaotic four years in office Everyone was exhausted, including his own followers. Mr. Biden referred to his predecessors as the former guy and tried to switch the conversation to a more promising future rather than dwelling on the past. He had campaigned in 2020 on the promise of a return to normalcy, and he has by and large delivered on that.
That’s fundamentally what the 2024 election is about. Romney is worried about the future of American self-government, like many others, even though he seems to agree with Biden about the threat of another Trump presidency.
In the Biden speech, Trump said he was proud to post on social media the words that best described his campaign, which included revenge, power and dictatorship. I don’t know what Biden was talking about, but I follow politics closely. When I was on vacation after Christmas, Trump posted a word cloud on his social media account demonstrating the terms voters in a survey are often associated with his political goals. In the center, in large, red-orange letters, are “power,” “dictatorship” and, most prominently of all, “revenge.” By the time I got back online on December 29, Trump’s boast about his authoritarian image had disappeared from the news cycle. The human mind can not keep up with Trumps speed and scale, so this forgetting is a result of that.
Biden gave his second campaign speech of the year at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the site of a racist mass murder in 2015. 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.