President Joe Biden’s planned prime-time speech to frame the midterm elections as a battle for the “soul of the nation” expands his conflict with former President Donald Trump into a fight against “Trumpism” more broadly.
This theme has shown up in Biden’s ultra-MAGA messaging but dates back to his argument that his last campaign was a crusade to save democracy, which picked up steam after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to disrupt the certification of his victory and continued into his ill-fated voting rights push.
BEATING EXPECTATIONS IN NOVEMBER COULD LEAVE DEMOCRATS STUCK WITH BIDEN IN 2024
More recently, Biden has called the political tendency he is opposing “semi-fascist” and said it is not confined to Trump himself. “And what we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy,” he told a Democratic National Committee reception last week. “It’s not just — it’s not just Trump.”
The speech still comes at an interesting time in Biden’s personal political rivalry with Trump. Biden’s Justice Department, led by the man Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) kept off the Supreme Court to keep the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat warm for a Trump nominee, is investigating Trump for his handling of classified information at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Effectively putting Trump on the midterm ballot is a core piece of the Democrats’ 2022 strategy, in an effort to avoid the race for control of Congress becoming a referendum on Biden’s presidency. It’s a message the White House amplifies often.
The Senate, now split 50-50, will come down to the success of Trump’s hand-picked candidates in several battleground states. At least two of them, J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, are running explicitly as Trump-style populists.
Finally, Biden and Trump look to be on a collision course, each of them seemingly preparing for a rematch in 2024. Even if only one or neither of them ends up running, their understudies, including Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in California and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, are already emphasizing the same themes.
Central to Biden’s small-d democratic argument is his popular vote win in 2020, which was larger than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. Democrats frequently tout the president’s 7 million-vote edge over Trump as a clear and convincing mandate.
At the same time, Biden won just 51.3% of the popular vote. That’s an absolute majority, 4.4 percentage points ahead of Trump’s share. But it’s also closer to Jimmy Carter’s win over Gerald Ford in 1976 than Lyndon Johnson’s landslide in 1964. And in the constitutionally decisive Electoral College, Biden won by about 43,000 votes in three states, a margin won with COVID-19 voting protocols in place.
As Biden seeks to broaden his critique of Trump to include other Republicans, he risks appearing to condemn tens of millions of his predecessor’s supporters. He has tried to make a distinction between Republicans in general and those of the “ultra-MAGA” variety.
“I respect conservative Republicans,” Biden said at a DNC rally to begin his midterm election campaigning. “I don’t respect these MAGA Republicans.” When asked who these traditional conservatives were, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre mentioned centrist Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. Biden hailed Hogan as someone who is “at least … within the mainstream of the Republican Party.”
Biden’s definition of “ultra-MAGA” is also elastic. He regularly cites a plan by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) as evidence the GOP believes “Social Security and Medicaid should be on the chopping block.” Scott is chairman of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, but McConnell has distanced himself from this plan. Trump ran to the left of former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on entitlement spending.
Barry Goldwater, now often painted as a traditional conservative deserving of respect that should be denied to Trump Republicans, opposed the creation of Medicare and went further on privatizing Social Security than any post-New Deal Republican nominee. Former President George W. Bush, seen as an ally in the fight for democracy, proposed partial privatization of Social Security in 2005.
Abortion is another example of undemocratic ultra-MAGA Republicanism. But it has been a contested area in American politics for over 50 years. The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade allows abortion policy to be set democratically, even in favor of abortion rights if the voters so choose.
Democrats have also intervened multiple times in Republican primaries for the benefit of candidates who have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election — on the grounds that they would be easier to beat. This included siding against Hogan’s preferred candidate in the Maryland gubernatorial primary in favor of Trump’s pick. Democratic money arguably put the GOP primary challenger to Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI), an incumbent who voted to impeach Trump for his conduct on Jan. 6, over the top.
All this makes it seem as if democracy means Democrats winning elections, which also complicates the voting rights versus voting integrity debate.
Beating Trump is a big part of Biden’s legacy with Democrats. Yet it’s not a foregone conclusion he can do it again. The RealClearPolitics national polling average has Trump up by 2.2 points, something that didn’t happen often in 2020. An Emerson poll has Trump leading by 5 points in Georgia, one of the pivotal states that put Biden in the White House.
The White House has tried to take the crusade for democracy global, regularly invoking it, especially when defending Ukraine from invasion by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who many rank-and-file liberals blame for Trump’s 2016 election. In June, Biden warned the Summit of the Americas that “we meet … in a moment when democracy is under assault around the world.”
“We are at a moment in our world and in our country where so much of what we took for granted is now unsettled — so many things that we thought were long settled, unsettled. Around the globe, when we think about issues like territorial integrity and sovereignty. Here at home, when we look at issues like a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, or voting rights,” Vice President Kamala Harris said during a DNC fundraising event in her home state of California.
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As Biden gets ready to address the nation on Thursday, it’s clear his main targets are closer to home. “So let me say this to my MAGA Republican friends in Congress: Don’t tell me you support law enforcement if you won’t condemn what happened on the 6th,” Biden said Tuesday as he sought to redirect voter anger over “defund the police” to Republicans who have been quiet about the Capitol riot or who have called for defunding the FBI following the Mar-a-Lago raid.
“For God’s sake, whose side are you on?” Biden asked. “Whose side are you on?”
