The Wall Street Journal
It’s been obvious for years that while Democrats claim to fear and loathe Donald Trump, they really can’t live without him. They need him around, they want him around, because they think he’s their ticket to remain in power.
Any doubt about that proposition vanished with President Biden’s Sept. 8 speech that had a single political purpose: Elevating Trump to the center of the fall campaign. Forget all the high-minded talk about saving democracy, which is hardly in danger in a midterm election in which Trump isn’t even on the ballot.
The strategy is especially helpful for Biden, whose main (and perhaps only) utility to Democrats is as the man who defeated Trump. Without Trump to kick around, the unpopular 79-year-old president will likely be nudged, or perhaps elbowed, aside by younger Democrats in 2024. But if Trump runs again, Biden has a raison d’etre. As our columnist Holman Jenkins has argued, the two men are political co-dependents.
That’s why Biden has so pointedly goaded Trump and his followers with the “MAGA Republican” label. His escalating rhetoric is intended to smear the GOP as under Trump’s sway and “semi-fascist.”
All of this is deeply cynical and divisive. It contradicts Biden’s pledge, during the 2020 campaign and in his inaugural address, that he would unite the country. His strategy is to out-Trump Trump by polarizing the electorate around the former president because he thinks a majority will come his way.
In his broadside, Biden is maligning half the country and the 70 million Americans who voted for Trump. He includes a line that “not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans” are MAGA, but that too is a token gesture. He quickly moves on to say that “there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans and that is a threat to this country.”
Yet the people who really saved American democracy after the 2020 election and on Jan. 6 were Republicans:
• governors, secretaries of state and legislators who resisted Trump’s demand to change slates of electors to the Electoral College;
• judges appointed by Trump who followed the evidence and the law in assessing claims of election fraud;
• lawyers at the White House and Justice Department who refuted the claims of Trump’s clown-show legal team of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell;
• and above all Mike Pence, the vice president who followed the Constitution in rejecting Trump’s private and public pressure to stop the counting of electoral votes that certified Biden as the victor.
If Biden believed his saving democracy rhetoric, he’d include those Republicans as heroes of the cause. But he won’t because his democracy line is a political gambit. He has to smear most Republicans as would-be fascists to make swing voters believe none of them can be trusted with power.
Biden has become his foe’s polarizing mirror image. It is exactly what he promised as a candidate he wouldn’t do.
