Biden Starting to Sound Like Trump

As I write this, President Biden is calling into his favorite political morning show, complaining about the “elites in the party,” taunting his Democratic naysayers, deflecting questions and generally rambling. Sound familiar?

For a politician whose most salient pitch to voters is not being Donald Trump, Biden is starting to act a lot like him. Denying polling results, trashing the media, and most perniciously, insisting that he alone can save America from calamity: these are just some of the ways Biden has in recent days echoed Trump’s demagoguery. It’s an ironic twist for Biden, who also vows to make restoring “decency” a cornerstone of his presidency, and one which undermines his “Goofus and Gallant” campaign narrative. 

The transformation came almost immediately after the June 27 debate concluded when former Obama administration staffers turned hosts of the Podcast “Pod Save America” raised concerns about Biden’s performance. In a fundraising email widely seen as directed at the former Obama staffers, the Biden campaign blasted out a fundraising email decrying “self-important Podcasters” and calling them part of the “bedwetting brigade.”

It was the kind of vulgar insult right out of Trump’s playbook. I honestly thought the swipe was funny and sort of humanizing for a campaign that had tried so hard to portray itself as solemn and above the fray. They were harsh words for a podcast whose hosts had been stalwart defenders of Biden’s throughout his administration. But they were also a foreshadowing of the brash new Trumpian tone Biden was about to adopt.

Some of the other Trumpian flourishes were funny and basically harmless, if uncanny in their parallels. There’s Biden’s sudden skepticism that all polls but his own ones are wrong. A representative comment from his ABC interview on July 5: 

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. President, I've never seen a President [with] 36 percent approval get reelected.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Well, I don't believe that's my approval rating. That's not what our polls show.

There’s also swipes at the media. From a Biden campaign fundraising email a week ago: 

“Did you see the awesome clips of our supporters on the tarmac doing the Cupid Shuffle at 2am on the night of the debate? Well, no, probably not, because the media is busy hyperventilating and trying to manifest drama to boost ratings.”

Criticism of the news media, an institution that consistently polls impressively low among Americans, is unlikely to offend anyone (not even me and I’m a news guy!). But the silence about it does contrast rather sharply with the hyperbolic cries that Trump’s own derision of the press has been met with.

Then there’s the God talk. This past Friday, when asked if he would end his campaign if Democrats in Congress said he was hurting their chances of reelection, Biden invoked the man upstairs.

"If the Lord Almighty comes out and tells me that I might do that,” Biden said, shifting the buck somewhere else. 

Trump has also invoked God , saying: “I think if you had a real election and Jesus came down and God came down and said, ‘I’m gonna be the scorekeeper here,’ I think we’d win [in California], I think we’d win in Illinois, and I think we’d win in New York.”

A similar messianic vision comes through in their respective foreign policy promises, with Biden saying he’s on the verge of crafting a ceasefire in Gaza and achieving a Middle East peace deal — a probable reference to the moonshot Saudi-Israel normalization his administration has been chasing for years now.Trump, on the other hand, assures America that he would end the war in Ukraine “in one day” (lol).

The Trump/Biden parallel that’s really concerning, though, is the existential stakes the two would like you to think the election carries. Trump regales us with his usual scaremongering about the hordes of rapists, murderers and fentanyl traffickers pouring through the southern border, hair raising rhetoric that shocked in previous elections but by now passes largely without comment. What feels new is Biden’s attempts to keep up with the alarmism.

“I know I will respect the limits of presidential power as I have for the three-and-a-half years, but any president, including Donald Trump, will now be free to ignore the law,” Biden said at a press conference last Monday, paraphrasing (misleadingly) the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, which only applies to official acts. Legal experts have questioned whether the decision really changes much since presidents have long enjoyed effective immunity for their official acts. But in our political time, the stakes have to be maximal.

Of course, the content of what Biden and company are saying is completely different than Trump, with the former president reveling in tearing down the system while Biden is its guardian. Biden and the Democrat party faithful would like the voters to think that democracy itself is on the ballot, to me a kind of 9/11 framework that defaults to the existential — a maximalist everything that purports to represent our last, best hope to avert imminent destruction.

Whether it’s democracy is at stake or Trump’s blood cry that the porous borders threaten everything, the unfortunate commonality is the narrative that America is teetering on the brink, a state of affairs I’ve experienced my entire adult life. Hidden behind all of this is that two old men are the only choice and that the political system is completely broken, with the elite news media the constant broadcaster of the supposed apocalypse.

— Edited by William M. Arkin