December 13, 2024
Far from being an alien, the future president takes his origins from homegrown authoritarianism.
In March 2019, Joe Biden summoned his longtime confidant Ron Klein to his residence in Wilmington, Delaware. Biden was gathering his strength for the presidential bid and wanted to develop the idea of his candidacy. At the age of 76, Biden has been dismissed as a political man whose time has come and gone. Naturally, he didn’t share that view, and in fact felt emboldened by the outrages of Donald Trump’s presidency — especially Trump’s open embrace of racism (as evidenced by the infamous comments from “great people” on both sides of the aisle in response to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia) and contempt for the internationalism of foreign policy.
According to Bob Woodward’s new book,WarBiden told Klein, “Trump represents something fundamentally different and wrong about politics.” Biden added: “This guy is just not the American president.” According to Woodward, those words “will stay with Klein forever,” summing up Biden’s latest political mission: defeat Trump in the presidential race and defeat Trumpism’s existential threat to American democracy.
If Biden’s political mission was to defeat Trump and Trumpism, then we have to say that Joe Biden has failed. It is true that by winning the 2020 election, Biden temporarily prevented the rise of Trumpism. It should also be recognized that Biden (especially early in his presidency, when Ron Klein was his adviser) was an impressive domestic president who carried out the most significant expansion of social policy since the 1960s.
But all of that was for naught in light of Trump’s victory in 2024 — a return to power that allowed Joe Biden more than any other man. It was Biden’s arrogance that made him run against the odds again public survey shows that most of the public, including those who voted for him in 2020, thought he was too old. The contrast between an age-ravaged Biden and a still-energetic Trump was particularly stark during the first presidential debate on June 27, which was followed by weeks of Democratic angst that culminated in Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. This emotionally draining drama battered his successor, Kamala Harris, and also greatly tarnished Biden’s reputation.
Biden’s failure was not only personal, but also political and ideological. Despite calling himself anti-Trump, Biden largely didn’t understand what Trump and Trumpism were. His mistake can be seen in the remark that made such a strong impression on Klein: “This guy is simply not the American president.”
The big mistake of Biden and other centrist liberals is that they saw Trump as an alien imported into healthy America. This is Hillary Clinton’s basic logic description about Trump as Vladimir Putin’s “puppet” and the absurd energy and hope invested in the Russiagate investigation, which produced evidence that Trump had obstructed justice and had nefarious political associates, but did not support the terrifying fantasy that the Republican president was a longtime Russia’s “asset” (possibility raised centrist columnist Jonathan Chaitamong others).
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There is some truth to Trump’s connection to foreign sources. After the financial crash of 2008, the world’s democracies were engulfed anti-system politicswith turbulent outsiders challenging long-held consensus politics. Anti-systemic politics has both left and right variants. The left-wing version can be seen in figures such as Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in England and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico. Trump shares many similarities with other right-wing anti-establishment politicians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Javier Millais, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and France’s Marine Le Pen.
But the parallels are that these politicians are responding to the same political moment and communicating ideas across borders. This is a completely different matter than being a puppet or asset of a foreign state.
Trump is a right-wing anti-establishment politician with an American face. my Nation colleague Elie Mystal recently wrote with his characteristic eloquence about Trump’s essential Americanness:
We are not “better” than Trump. In any case, thinking that we are better than Trump, thinking that there is some “silent majority” that opposes the man’s frivolous grotesqueries, is the underlying conceit that has led the Democratic Party to such utter collapse. America wished Trump into existence. It was created out of our greed, our insecurities and our selfishness. We called to him from the depths of our own bile and need, and he answered.
Democrats will never defeat Trumpism unless they realize that Biden is wrong and Mistal is right. Trump is as American as baseball and apple pie, though far less wholesome than either. He is the dark side of American individualism and lawlessness, a manifestation of what Philip Roth once called (in his 1997 novel American pastoral) “Native American lunatic.”
To understand Trump, one must look at the long and hidden history of right-wing antiestablishment politics in America, which historians such as John Gantz, David Austin Walsh, Nancy McLean, and Nicole Hammer are now uncovering. These authors have shown that while right-wing antiestablishment politics only rose to national power with Trump, they have long seeped into the corners of public life, often influencing mainstream conservatives.
The tradition that created Trump goes back to the racist reaction to Reconstruction, to the Ku Klux Klan in its many manifestations, to the demagoguery of Huey Long and Joseph McCarthy. Trump himself was introduced to this dark tradition by his mentor Roy Cohn, assisted by McCarthy.
As Trump returns to power, we can no longer afford the illusions of Joe Biden, who pursued a policy of restoration of the old regime that was doomed to failure. A lifelong centrist, Biden has never been able to come to terms with the true power of right-wing anti-establishment politics. He saw it as fringe and anti-American, even though it was a deep-seated trend that ran throughout modern American history. To combat right-wing anti-establishment politics will require abandoning centrist illusions about the essential innocence of American history.
Biden staked his political fortunes on his misunderstanding of Trump. Seeing Trump as alien to America, Biden did not understand the homegrown appeal of Trump’s message. Nor could Biden grasp the fact that in a period of anti-establishment sentiment, it was counterproductive to appeal to the traditions of bipartisan civility as a bulwark against this supposedly alien threat. Biden’s frequent references to bipartisan chatter (which bore fruit with Kamala Harris’s embrace of Liz Cheney) only reinforced Trump’s claim to be an outsider fighting against a corrupt bipartisan elite.
The vast majority of Americans hovers between 65 and 70 percent in pollsunhappy with the direction the country is going. Given this reality, the only way to win for the Democrats is left-wing anti-establishment politics. Unfortunately, the Democrats followed Biden’s preferences and declared themselves as the pro-establishment party. This strategy has failed — spectacularly. In light of this failure, we must now turn to political traditions on the left that have never had any illusions about right-wing anti-establishment politics—or about American innocence.
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