Joe Biden has made his first big speech since leaving the White House, expressing his astonishment at the high-speed destructiveness of Donald Trump’s first months in office.
Speaking to a conference of advocates for the disabled in Chicago, the former president said that “in fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction. It’s kind of breathtaking.”
He accused Trump of “taking a hatchet” to the Social Security Administration that provides benefits to more than 70 million Americans. The agency, now under Trumpian control, retorted brutally that “former president Joe Biden is lying to Americans”.
Biden, 82, rambled at times in his speech and told stories about his working-class background, unintentionally reminding his audience of the declining mental acuity, brought on by ageing, which led to his retirement as Democratic Party presidential candidate last July.
His last-minute replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, reportedly blames her defeat on the short time she had to campaign and to establish her own political identity, though her campaigning skills were never likely to rival Trump’s.
No doubt Biden and the Democratic Party leadership – not to mention most Americans – are still in a state of shock at the frightening velocity with which Trump is radically upending the American political system. This is being compared to the impact of the Brexit referendum on the UK in 2016, but this is to underestimate the transformative nature of what is happening in the US. Trump’s second presidency feels more like a full-scale counter-revolution against all the political, judicial and administrative developments in the US since the New Deal in the 1930s.
As a representative of the old order, its virtues as well as vices, Biden is now aghast as he sees his worst nightmares being realised. Norms established over the decades, if not the centuries, are being overthrown in a few days.
On 14 April, for instance, Trump chose to ignore a unanimous Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an innocent man mistakenly deported to a brutal maximum-security prison in El Salvador. With El Salvador’s strongman and president, Nayib Bukele, beside him, Trump claimed without any evidence that the deportee, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was “a terrorist”. He remarked to Bukele that he might need to build more prisons to accommodate more “homegrown” deportees, by which he presumably meant US citizens opposed to him.
No wonder Biden is horrified, saying hopefully that Trump’s dictatorial measures are approved by only 30 per cent of Americans, “but it’s roughly 30 per cent that has no heart”. Predictably the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, shot back with abusive taunts about Biden’s age and fitness: “I’m shocked that he is speaking at nighttime. I thought his bedtime was much earlier than his speech tonight.”
During the presidential campaign, Kamala Harris and others periodically attacked Trump as “weird” and even, on one occasion, as “a fascist”, but they did not repeat these terms, fearful that they would alienate middle-of-the-road voters. But on election day, it turned out that these supposed moderates were in short supply. Once again, the Democratic Party leadership underestimated in 2024, as they had done in 2016, Trump’s demagogic skills until it was too late.
Read Next
square PATRICK COCKBURN
Read More
They accused him of dictatorial ambitions, saying that 2024 might be the last fair presidential election in US history, but they demonstrably did not believe their own rhetoric. Several potential Democratic Party candidates hung back last year, believing that they would stand a better chance of winning the White House in 2028. They are now discovering that the Cassandras were all too correct in prophesising that Trump would turn the US into an authoritarian state, like Turkey and India, where the odds are permanently tipped against the opposition by, in the case of the US, the government’s controlling influence over the federal government’s administrative machinery, judiciary, media and Congress.
The problem for the Democratic Party leaders is that they play by the rules and do not know how to fight back effectively against those who do not. Several Democratic politicians and pundits have recommended sitting back and awaiting the moment when “Trumpism” implodes through its own contradictions. Astonishingly, they have pursued this disastrous approach since 2016 and have not learned the lesson that they cannot simply cede the political arena to Trump and expect him to self-destruct.
They ignored the fact that with much of the American electorate hungry for change – particularly those who had not benefited from globalisation and neo-liberalism – they had nothing much to offer in the 2024 presidential election, except more of the same. They created a vacuum of information about their future intentions which Trump was able to fill with toxic remedies for America’s ills, which he is now administering to a patient that may prove too shell-shocked to resist – even if many believe they are consuming poison.
