It was the week when everyone in Washington had to check it was still September 2023 and not September 2024.
While Republicans won't start to pick their presidential nominee for nearly four months, it feels like the general election -- expected to be a rematch of Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump -- has already started.
Both Trump and Biden showed up in swing state Michigan courting blue collar votes this week. The president also headed west to Arizona, a state he barely won in 2020 and home to fast-expanding suburbs that are transforming the US political map. Biden must draw huge turnout there to win back the White House next year.
After weeks of Democratic handwringing about his reelection chances and an unflattering public debate about his age, Biden slipped into a more aggressive, sarcastic and campaigning mode. He returned to the theme that democracy is under attack -- a slam dunk given Trump's week of autocratic outbursts and demagoguery. He cited public statements of a predecessor who disrupted the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 to warn that US founding values were threatened. "Frankly, these extremists have no idea what the hell they're talking about," Biden said in a speech in Arizona, referring to Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) acolytes. "They're pushing a notion the defeated former president expressed when he was in office and believes applies only to him, and this is a dangerous notion -- that this president's above the law, no limits on power."
Biden was returning to the theme that drove him into the presidential race in 2020 -- that Trump represented an existential threat to the Constitution. He confounded pundits by successfully using the same strategy in the midterm elections in 2022, which helped subvert an expected Republican red wave. By invoking democracy in peril, Biden hopes to pull off a bigger trick --convincing Americans rocked by inflation and high interest rates, who worry about his health through a second term, that the election is about something bigger: "We are at an inflection point in our history," Biden said.
Almost everything that Trump did over the past week played into the president's warning. Continuing a habit that threatens the personal security of his adversaries, he suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who stood up for constitutional governance during his final days in office, should have been executed. He warned he'd use a second presidency of "retribution" to try to close down media organizations, specifically MSNBC. In Detroit, Trump accused Biden of trying to mount a government "assassination" of the auto industry by supporting cleaner electric cars.
Yet at the same time, a fresh burst of polling showed that close to a majority of Republican voters still love Trump. The ex-president still speaks for millions of Americans, who see him as voicing their anger with government, media, culture, economic and legal institutions -- and who believe his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump's campaign strategy of presenting indictments against him as examples of political persecution is working among Republican voters, and Biden's warnings about democracy under attack won't change that.
No comments:
Post a Comment