Too Tired to Talk About Trump? Too Bad.
Biden may not want to talk about Trump, but we don't have a choice.
When Joe Biden took the stage in Milwaukee for his first town hall as president, it was inevitable that he would be asked about what millions of Americans just witnessed: a historic impeachment trial concerning the former president’s successful effort to violently disrupt the country’s democratic process. But when asked for his reaction to 44 Republican senators shielding former President Trump from all accountability for the Capitol insurrection, Biden was having none of it:
I'm not going to call names out. I -- look, I -- for four years, all that's been in the news is Trump. The next four years, I want to make sure all the news is the American people. I'm tired of talking about Trump.
The audience applauded, and why not? We’re tired. Four years of incessant lying, unspeakable cruelty and blistering incompetence is painfully exhausting. But if the Trump-era taught us anything, it’s that we ignore the threat of right-wing extremism—and particularly, Trump’s leading role in it—at our own peril. Of course we don’t want to talk about it. But unfortunately, we have to.
Sadly, Biden’s answer highlights a recurring theme in how Democratic leaders have approach Trump. It is, for example, hard to listen to Biden’s comments without recalling the events of just a few days ago, when Democratic senators—led by staunch Biden-ally Chris Coons—shot down the House impeachment managers’ plan to call witnesses as part of Trump’s impeachment trial. According to a Politico report, the flip-flop on witnesses stemmed from the simple fact that many senators just had enough: “there were no more votes” from Republicans, said a Coons spokesperson, “and their members were ready to fly home.” The fight was over, in other words. It was time to change the subject.
The belief that Democrats can safely move on from Trump is nothing new, and it will prove to be a misguided impulse now just as it has repeatedly in the past. It was just several months ago that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recommended that Biden skip the presidential debates with Trump, arguing, “I wouldn't legitimize a conversation with him.” Biden didn’t listen, and it turned out that putting Trump’s ignorance and petulance on display in the first debate was one of the major inflection points in the entire campaign.
The calls to turn the page also bring to mind Representative Hakeem Jeffries’s argument in early-January that Trump should not be impeached for his efforts to overturn the results of the election because Democrats were set on “looking forward.” Two days after he made that statement, the Capitol was attacked by a violent mob of Trump-inspired fascists.
The examples go on and on. The refusal to aggressively pursue Trump’s tax returns, or impeach Trump for his role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, or subpoena members of the Trump administration to testify before Congress all look feckless and ill-advised in retrospect (and they did at the time, too). Time and again, putting Trump’s corruption on display and prosecuting the case against his enablers proves to be an extraordinarily effective political strategy, while ignoring it proves disastrous. Ironically, some solid proof of this fact is the impeachment trial that Democrats just conducted, which, prior to the debacle over witnesses, had Republican senators squirming and Trump furious. Indeed, the last conclusion one should draw from the past several weeks is that it is smart, or safe, to brush off the threat of Trump and his supporters.
As it stands, Trump is going nowhere. Polls show him as the overwhelming favorite for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and prediction markets saw his chances at winning the nomination slightly increase following his acquittal. Since then, nearly every elected Republican who voted to convict Trump has faced brutal punishments back home. Meanwhile, not one Republican who voted to acquit him has experienced any consequences from their voters whatsoever.
In addition, like it or not, the media is going to continue to follow Trump’s every move for the next several years, as well as his enduring grip on the Republican Party. Biden and other Democrats will be—and should be—asked many questions about what Trump’s presence means for the future of the country and how it affects progressive priorities. “I don’t want to talk about it” is not an answer that is likely to satisfy anyone.
But even in the unlikely scenario that Trump himself stays out of the public eye—if he decides to spend his twilight years hiding on his golf courses in South Florida—the movement he inspired is unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. As Yasmeen Serhan writes in The Atlantic, if Trumpism begins to fade, it will be a major historical exception:
If populist movements have proved anything, it’s their remarkable staying power, even after their leaders have been removed from power, democratically or otherwise. From Berlusconism in Italy to Peronism in Argentina and Fujimorismo in Peru, personality-driven movements rarely fade once their leaders have left office. In the face of victimization, real or imagined, they often thrive.
Bucking this trend will require not only a commitment to enacting the most popular portions of Biden’s agenda, but also a concerted effort to reverse the right’s firm counter-majoritarian grip on American government. It will require, for example, eliminating the filibuster, adding Washington D.C. as a state, vigorously protecting voting rights and counter-balancing years of right-wing court packing. This will be hard, and will require an unprecedented top-to-bottom effort on the left to pressure their more moderate leaders and build the case against the GOP. This, obviously, will not happen if we are too “tired” to talk about Trump.
This all adds up to a very real political opportunity for the Democratic Party. Trump’s ownership of the GOP has sent the party into crisis, creating a leadership that cannot, for the time being, offer voters anything besides allegiance to one man. As Greg Sargent writes in the Washington Post, this “gives Democrats an opening to fill the populist space,” not only with progressive policies but also with a strong pro-democracy agenda that punishes the GOP and stops it in its tracks. This, again, cannot happen if we categorically refuse to discuss the rotten core of the Republican Party.
If our exhaustion causes us to fall asleep at the wheel just as we gained the power to right the ship, it will be a tragedy we may never recover from. To truly defeat Trump and the fascist right-wing movement he activated, we must do everything in our power to stay awake.