Democrats Have Become What They Claim to Hate

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 02, 2024

 

Joe Biden’s infirmities and their contributions to the president’s maladroit performance have imposed a paradox on the country. The Democratic Party has been reduced to making the negative case for Biden — not that he is a particularly adept president or that his presence in the Oval Office is desirable in itself, but that he is a better steward of the executive branch than Donald Trump. That wouldn’t be a remarkable strategy for an unpopular incumbent save the fact that the incumbent and his movement increasingly mirror all that they despise about Trump.

 

With barely concealed self-satisfaction, Democratic partisans observed throughout the Trump years as the GOP talked itself into backing their party’s unfit nominee by indulging a variety of wild hypotheticals. Joe Biden will “destroy the suburbs,” Donald Trump warned. He had set out to “kill the American Dream,” “dismantle your police departments,” and take a torch to so many American institutions that “you won’t have a country anymore.” Trump’s supporters mimicked his rhetorical overreach, adopting his presuppositions and taking them to their logical, if extreme, conclusions.

 

Today, Joe Biden’s supporters are busily convincing themselves that similarly apocalyptic outcomes are inevitable in a Trump restoration. And they’re doing so with utter disregard for how they look to less passionate observers. Joe Biden has long warned that “democracy is at stake” on November 5, and predictions of America’s inevitable descent into autocracy if Trump is reelected have become a staple of his supporters’ rhetoric. But the Supreme Court’s circumspect verdict defining the parameters of presidential immunity has given Biden acolytes new license to indulge their wildest fantasies. Trump, they say, has just been handed license to order the extrajudicial murder of his opponents, cancel elections, and take bribes with impunity.

 

To the uninitiated ear, this sounds like hyperbole fueled by hyper-partisanship, panic, and limited familiarity with the Court’s ruling. As with Trump’s movement, however, the true believers see themselves as Cassandras cursed with foreknowledge of our fates.

 

Likewise, Biden’s most prominent supporters have adopted tactics designed to shield their party’s president from accountability. The president’s handlers are doing their best to keep Joe Biden out of the public eye, operating under the justifiable assumption that the candidate most likely to lose the race is the candidate with the most exposure. That was the same assumption on which Trump’s handlers operated.

 

“I think what Biden was trying to say” has become a lamentably ubiquitous feature of partisan Democratic discourse. Surely, in their quiet moments, the critics who mocked the obligation the former president’s backers felt that led them to translate Trump’s syntactically garbled half-thoughts into English must lament their own devolution.

 

Biden’s allies have taken to defending the campaign’s principal not by expressing faith in his judgment but by touting the more responsible Democrats with whom the president is surrounded. “I would take Joe Biden’s worst day at age 89,” former Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson said Tuesday, “so long as he has people around him like Avril Haines, Samantha Power, Gina Raimondo supporting him.” The notion that Trump’s appointees and staffers diligently saved the president from acting on his worst impulses was promulgated relentlessly by enterprising Republicans appealing to more skeptical quarters of the electorate. And even when those Republicans failed to keep Trump in check, the former president’s fans argued, lingering doubts in the president’s judgment should be quelled by his demonstrable talent for judging the character of his appointees. Sound familiar?

 

Similarly, the Democratic Party’s warnings about the threat Trump poses to the American civic compact were long ago denuded by Joe Biden’s actions. Democrats warn that Trump will head a lawless administration, but that admonition rings hollow after three years in which the president has repeatedly admitted that the actions he was taking were beyond his constitutional remit. From extending amnesty to migrants, to abrogating property rights, to transferring individual debt burdens onto the taxpaying public, Biden has repeatedly — indeed, boastfully — flouted the rule of law and the courts that enforce it.

 

Even the chaos at the street level in the Trump years that Biden’s grandfatherly demeanor was meant to remedy has persisted. Voters could be forgiven for thinking that — like Trump — the menacing mobs threatening social comity enjoyed a particular latitude because the president lacked the will or impulse to rein them in. How many hours have the president and his supporters devoted to mollycoddling the disruptive, vandalistic, sometimes violent anti-Israel demonstrators in America’s streets and on its college campuses? And toward what end, save that the president’s team made the cold calculation that it could not afford to alienate even the most grotesque barnacles that cling to the underside of the party’s coalition? Why should persuadable voters see that impulse as distinct from the one to distinguish the hooligans from the “very fine people“?

 

All this is rendered odder by the fact that Democrats know none of these tactics worked for Donald Trump or his associates. These are acts of desperation. They do not forestall the inevitable — indeed, they may hasten it. But what other course is available with Methuselah ensconced at the top of the ticket? It’s not just that the Biden campaign can no longer draw a compelling contrast with Trump. It’s that his administration has actively diluted the contrasts it wielded successfully in 2020.

 

And then, to add insult to injury, when the president appeared at the lectern yesterday to denounce the Supreme Court (another unflattering parallel), his complexion had transformed into an unsettling shade of orange. Voters are not short on metaphors for Biden’s degeneration, but his physical transformation into the figure Democrats most oppose must rank near the top of that list.