AP/Susan Walsh
The White House is now faced with a conundrum — how to make the case against Donald Trump as a quasi-Nazi while lowering the proverbial temperature after his near-assassination?
Joe Biden’s Oval Office address calling for toning down the overheated rhetoric in our politics was fine as far as it went, except it included no mea culpa, no assurance that he’ll try to do better himself, no recognition that his political and media allies have been the worst offenders.
Over-the-top attacks on Trump haven’t been incidental to the Democratic 2024 campaign, but central to it.
If Biden himself had been careful and responsible in his criticisms of Trump and Republicans, he would have been rendered practically mute the last few years.
Several years ago, he called the push for enhanced voter ID laws and the like in Republican states, “the most serious test of our democracy since the Civil War,” and characterized it as a “21st century Jim Crow assault” on voting rights.
When voting reforms actually didn’t end American democracy, he didn’t go back and correct the record.
The focus, of course, has been Trump.
In his unsettling and weird Philadelphia speech on “the soul of America” back in September 2022, Biden fulminated, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
He urged Democrats, independents, “mainstream” Republicans to be “stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to destroying American democracy.”
That’s been relatively mild compared to how Trump has been routinely characterized by Biden’s boosters as an American Hitler who will end our democracy and assassinate and imprison his critics with impunity if he’s elected to a second term.
This isn’t the handiwork of fringe voices on social media or YouTube, but some of the most respected and established voices in the party, from nearly everyone who appears on MSNBC to Hillary Clinton.
On top of this, Joe Biden’s Justice Department and his political allies have repeatedly indicted Donald Trump in hopes of taking him out politically and perhaps putting him in prison for the rest of his life, an unprecedented legal assault against a political opponent that has enormously raised the emotional and real stakes of 2024.
In his attempt to claw back from his catastrophic debate performance, Biden assailed Trump at a rally in Detroit just days ago as “a threat to this nation,” as his supporters chanted, “Lock him up!”
And he won plaudits from his own side — this is what they want to hear and enjoy hearing.
It has all added up to a constant, deliberate attempt to keep the fear and hatred of Trump at a fever pitch, and portray the fight against him as literally existential.
Who knows what if any effect this had on Trump’s attempted assassin, but after the horror of Butler, Penn., even Democrats feel as though things have gotten out of control.
They’ll just never admit their own responsibility.
Biden’s strategy has been to take the Barack Obama approach in the 2012 presidential campaign, which was to vilify Mitt Romney in the harshest and most personal terms, and turn it up to 11.
Also like Obama, Biden has governed as far left as he plausibly can while eschewing any serious turn to the center during his re-election bid.
Long gone is the triangulation of a Bill Clinton, who sought to win over the broad middle by moderating on substance.
Biden, though, is less talented and less popular than Obama, and now has seen his opponent come within an inch of getting murdered at one of his political rallies, generating a wave of sympathy for him — and of shock at how we got to this place.
Maybe Democrats could say they disagree with Trump’s policies and hate what he did after the 2020 election without invoking Hitler, fascism, or any number of other bogeymen that are false and inflammatory?
If so, there’s a first time for everything.
Twitter: @RichLowry