The Republicans are underestimating Biden again

It feels rather as if we’re living inside classic science fiction where the psychotropic drugs are only just wearing off and reality is slowly coming back into focus. 

For a start, the collected surprise around Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech should not have been any surprise. Not for anybody living outside the GOP bubble. I seem to have spent much of the past year contradicting anybody who took the “Sleepy Joe” talking points at face value, whilst the media whipped itself into a froth based on… not very much at all.

This year’s State of the Union should have been renamed “the State of the President” since, for over an hour, the nation finally had a chance to get some quality time with the man seeking re-election in November. This was a chance for ordinary Americans to see if Joe Biden was the doddering, spluttering, drooling old man portrayed across huge swathes of the media.

The fact he wasn’t highlighted, in turn, the fundamental weakness of the GOP’s political strategy, if fawning devotion to Donald Trump’s shallow caprice can be said to be in any way “strategic”. Republicans had set the bar so low for Biden that anything better than him being wheeled in on a gurney and fed soup through a tube would have looked like a win. But Biden did a lot better than that and, in a combative hour, made the case that the incumbent has more than a bit of fight left in him. Republicans now look weaker than they looked a week ago and that is largely their fault, as was the very poor choice of Katie Britt to lead their response, even if casting for the new remake of The Stepford Wives is now ahead of schedule.

This is the problem the Republicans have and have had for a while. The Joe Biden of their rhetoric was always the product of Donald Trump’s imagination. As so often with Trump, much of that appears to be a matter of projection: Trump sees corruption, weakness, sickness, infidelity, and treason in others because he fears or sees them in himself. And he continues in his delusion because nobody he might listen to will stand up and point out that he’s simply wrong. Fearful of the potent (if increasingly diminished) Trump base, Republicans in Congress repeat the slanders lest they are accused of contradicting their leader. This is no basis for running an election campaign. You cannot simply say something enough times to make reality match your words. That’s not how reality works. It’s not how words work.

On Tuesday, Biden and Trump finally secured enough votes to become the nominees of their respective parties. These races were very much dead rubbers but the numbers around Trump should still make Republicans a little fearful of their chances. The support for Trump among Republicans is not what it was in 2016 or even 2020. Meanwhile, the President is now actively out on the trail. On Monday, he made his first stop in two years in New Hampshire, attending a rally at a YMCA in Goffstown. It was a good indicator that his argument for a proactive government is where Biden thinks the battle will be won. “I’m doing everything I can to lower health care costs to provide people with peace of mind,” he told supporters. “Through the inflation reduction act, a law I proposed and signed, and not one Republican voted for it, I might add, we finally beat big pharma. Capped total prescription drug costs for seniors and Medicare at $2,000 a year.”

Even in this, Trump perversely handed Biden some ammunition, appearing on CNBC over the weekend to suggest: “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.”

The Trump campaign attempted to patch up the latest hole punched into their hull by their candidate. “If you losers didn’t cut his answer short, you would know President Trump was talking about cutting waste,” they said. But it was too late, already handing an early advantage to Biden whose team quickly spread the message across social media that nobody would be reducing their government support: “Not on my watch” said Biden on a Twitter account that has become noticeably adroit in responding to events quickly.

Again, Republicans were making the same mistake: fighting some fictional version of Joe Biden they want in the White House rather than the actual man who is now focused on executing the Democrat’s game plan. He might make the occasional slip but generally numbers are in his favour. Polls are fickle and might suggest Trump has an edge but the underlying logic, the so-called “Keys to the White House”, suggests it’s Biden’s to lose. (Of the twelve key indicators where a loss of five would indicate defeat for the incumbent, Biden is arguably down – and only slightly – in three.) Conversely, Donald Trump appears increasingly rattled. 

Take the example of TikTok. The House voted on Wednesday to ban TikTok from the United States unless the company cuts its ties with China. It was a position previously advocated by Trump and Republicans, including most prominently Steve Bannon. Democrats also agree with Joe Biden who confirmed, “If they pass it, I’ll sign it”. Except now Trump – the original TikTokman – has performed a volte-face, and wants Republicans to do the same. On Truth Social, he said that “[i]f you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck [Mark Zuckerberg] will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”

Trump’s change of heart had come after he’d met Jeff Vass, a Republican donor, who happens to have $33 billion invested in TikTok. Was Trump’s motivation to flip that obvious? It was according to Bannon who posed to social media: “Simple: Yass Coin.”

Can Republicans win an election when their chief spokesman changes day by day, has no focused message, and believes that reality can be altered simply through an act of will? “Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant,” said Sun Tzu in The Art of War. Only Donald Trump could get that the wrong way around. At Trump’s encouragement, Biden’s blunders have been consistently overstated, actions deliberately misinterpreted, and weaknesses poorly framed. Sometimes the evidence was simply falsified, as was seen in the testimony of the former special counsel, Robert Hur, before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Hur’s report into Biden was initially greeted as the most damning verdict of the President, yet its credibility is now all but shot. Various independent assessments of the President’s testimony have disagreed with Hur’s conclusion. As CBS characterise it: “While the president did stumble over some dates and facts, he recalled many others clearly, frequently describing events or details from years ago.”

During this week’s committee hearing, Hur’s conclusions were shown to be in stark contrast to the evidence. Hur himself was shown to have praised Biden’s “photographic understanding and recall” of a trip to Mongolia. The most damning conclusion of the report had been that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died”. Again, the written testimony proved otherwise. Biden had been asked if he knew the month his son had died. He did even better. “Oh, God, May 30,” he’d replied. Case closed.

Although so much around Biden’s age has made for some unpleasant headlines for Biden over the past year, none of this should hurt Biden as we look towards the election. Rather, as we saw this week, it allows Biden to prove the opposite. Republicans, meanwhile, must overcome the public’s opposition to their stances on abortion and guns, as well as an improving economy and Trump’s legal woes. But most of all, they must overcome their tendency to underestimate Biden. They did that in 2020 and again in 2022, and it looks like they’re making the very same mistakes again. 

@DavidWaywell

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