One moment, from about a year ago, still plays on a loop in the minds of many people close to Joe Biden. It was the final days before a midterm election that nearly everyone assumed would hobble his presidency. The president was putting the finishing touches on a speech he wanted to give about the imperiled state of American democracy, and the cacophonous second-guessing was coming not just from media critics and Republicans but even from fellow Democrats — including the former top political advisors to both Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. To this crowd, it was obvious that Biden was missing a chance to talk to undecided or unmotivated voters by not focusing on topics like the economy or crime; to Biden, whose aides still sometimes reminisce about that week’s MSNBC segments and tweets, it was clear the political class was simply missing the moment. In the aftermath of that speech and that election — in which Democrats outperformed expectations, beating dozens of election deniers — the president made no secret of his sense of vindication. Nor has he hidden his conviction that Americans have yet to have their final say over Donald Trump’s January 6 insurrection. In the year since, as his attention has turned more fully to his own re-election campaign, that feeling has only deepened.
It was no surprise to Biden’s closest allies, then, that he wanted to open 2024 answering all the fears about his electoral standing and his slow-and-steady campaign pace by returning to his favorite theme, the one that his senior-most advisers say animates him most when he’s with them in the Oval Office. His speech outside of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on Friday represented not just his harshest criticisms yet for Trump — who, Biden noted disbelievingly, has been using language reminiscent of Nazi Germany — but also his clearest articulation yet of his belief that the defense of American democracy is not just righteous and necessary but, as a result, an obvious political winner, too.
“When the attacks of January 6 happened, there was no doubt about the truth. At the time, even Republican members of Congress and Fox News commentators publicly and privately condemned the attack. And as one Republican senator said, Trump’s behavior was embarrassing and humiliating for the country,” Biden recalled. “But now as time has gone on, politics, fear, money have all intervened, and those MAGA voices who know the truth about Trump and January 6 have abandoned the truth and abandoned our democracy. They’ve made their choice. Now the rest of us — Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans — we have to make our choice. I know mine, and I believe I know America’s.”
The speech does not stand alone. It was a continuation of a yearslong argument Biden has been making and adapting to fit the fluctuating political moment. On Friday, he spoke as a candidate whose plan to keep his dangerous predecessor from office relies on Americans seeing the election as a stark choice, and not as a referendum on his own time in office. “We all know who Donald Trump is,” he reminded his crowd, and the millions he expects will see clips of the speech that his campaign has been promoting as a major event. “The question we have to answer is: Who are we?”
As he spoke, Biden returned to the notion that “America is an idea” that needs defending, a point he made most prominently when he first announced his campaign for the presidency with a video in April 2019 that began with the words “Charlottesville, Virginia” and a denunciation of Trump’s embrace of extremism after the white supremacist rally there. The initial rationale for his candidacy articulated in that video was that “The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America America is at stake.”
When Biden announced his re-election campaign exactly four years later, much had changed — this time the video opened with images of January 6 and protests against the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision — but the driving animus against extreme Trumpism hadn’t. By then, he was framing his broader task as protecting “freedom,” as “personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans,” and MAGA Republicans were out to negate voters’ say in elections as well as their right to choose and to read whatever books they wish. Biden-allied strategists had found in the midterms that this was an effective frame for younger and minority voters, even those skeptical of Biden’s handling of the economy.
And now, nearly a year later and facing grim polling, the unpopular Biden returned to his most powerful argument to stop Trump from returning to office, putting an end to drawn-out internal debates over when was the right time to turn fully to Trump even as the GOP primary technically drags on.
On Friday, Biden’s personal frustration with having to make the case at all was obvious. At times he veered off-script in fury. He called Trump “sick” and a “loser” and clenched his fists as he recalled Trump’s derogatory remarks about veterans who were killed in battle. Biden remembered thinking about that while visiting the grave of his own son Beau. “How dare he?” Biden asked. “Who in God’s name does he think he is?”
Biden: At his rally, he jokes about an intruder, whipped up by the big trump lie, taking a hammer to Paul Pelosi's skull, and echoing the same words used on January 6th, where's Nancy, and he thinks that's funny. He laughed about it. What a sick— pic.twitter.com/rG8yLrf1Hx
What was also clear was Biden’s determination that voters pay attention. Atypically, aides previewed the speech and another he will soon make in South Carolina as major ones. Biden, who loves scheduling speeches in venues full of historical symbolism, further signaled this one’s importance to the news media by speaking at Valley Forge, near where George Washington and the American army organized and dug in to survive. Biden had long been eyeing the site as a potent one. “We’ve been blessed for so long with a strong, stable democracy that it’s easy to forget why so many before us risked their lives to strengthen democracy, what our lives would be without it,” he said on Friday, recalling Washington’s decision to relinquish power as a contrast to Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election.
And his team paired the event with its first ad of the new year, which tied together the themes of Biden’s two kickoff videos with clips from both the Charlottesville and the Capitol riots, using clips of another symbolic Biden speech — one he made last year in Arizona to honor John McCain and criticize McCain’s party. Even before the speech, his campaign had made plans to spend half a million dollars spinning off of it by airing the new ad nationally and in the seven most important swing states for the next week.
Still, much like the Biden team’s broader push in recent weeks to warn voters of an authoritarian second Trump term, the set-piece was also an implicit acknowledgement that in a binary campaign, the president’s own record only gets him so far. Coming to terms with the necessary political consequences of this fact has been no simple task for Biden, no matter how often he repeats his old aphorism, “Don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative.”
In private, at least, he’s begun signaling that, with his approval rating bottoming out, he gets it. Late last month, at his final campaign fundraiser of the year in Bethesda, Maryland, he gazed out at a crowd of about 120 donors gathered in a backyard and ran through a series of his accomplishments. Then he pivoted. “We all know that progress is at stake in the next election, but I want to talk about what I think is even more at stake in this next election: literally the future of American democracy, and it makes everything possible,” he said. Trump is a unique threat, he suggested, before backing up for a second to inform the audience that just about every foreign leader he meets tells him “You’ve got to win.” He paused. That, he conceded, is “Less about me, unfortunately, I think, than about the other guy.”
On Friday, he gave this story another spin. This time, in front of the cameras, he said those world leaders had a slightly different message — a slightly more straightforward one: “He can’t win.”
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
