Biden’s call to tone down rhetoric crashes into Democrats’ need to demonise Donald Trump

Joe Biden’s White House address exposed a conundrum: The Democrats’ campaign relies on portraying Donald Trump as Hitler. They can’t do that if they mean what they say about toning down the rhetoric.

ANALYSIS

US president Joe Biden struck out in his first attempt to unify a fractured United States with his Oval Office address Sunday night Washington time.

Speaking to Americans a little over 24 hours after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, it was not his pallid appearance or occasionally stumbling delivery that brought the president undone.

Rather, it was Biden’s inability to escape the fundamental contradiction that comes with urging others to tone things down while leading a party whose entire reason for being rests on painting Trump as some sort of American Hitler.

There are two parts to this problem.

The first and most obvious is that he and senior democrats have done so much to dial up America’s rhetorical thermostat that Biden’s sudden call for unity looks suspiciously like a jailhouse conversion.

President Joe Biden addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Picture: AFO

The second is that because Democrats have based their entire 2024 campaign on the idea that Trump is a unique and scary threat to American democracy, any attempt to “lower the temperature” takes away their reason for being.

Look (as Biden himself might say), this is the same president whose social media team tweeted just last week that Americans want a president, not a dictator – a clear reference to the supposed authoritarian fascism a second Trump term would bring.

Supporters of former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump participate in the "In Trump We Trust" caravan near his Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, a day after the attempt to assassinate him. Picture: AFP

And now we’re supposed to tone things down?

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions,” Biden correctly told Americans.

“We can’t allow this violence to be normalised.”

All absolutely true.

As Biden’s Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese put it more eloquently on Sunday, “the essence and the purpose of our democracies is that we can express our views, debate our disagreements, and resolve our differences peacefully.”

Yet this is where Biden missed the opportunity to provide a true bipartisan account of how America has gotten to this point.

These Seattle protesters in 2020 never got the message about toning down the rhetoric. Karen Ducey/Getty Images/AFP

While ticking off the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill and an alleged kidnapping plot against Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer that was so compromised by FBI agents and informants that many believe it was a set-up, the president ignored countless examples of violence perpetrated by the left.

No mention of the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, or Antifa’s violent occupation of whole neighbourhoods in cities like Seattle and burning down police stations in Minneapolis.

No mention of Nicholas Roske, the 26 year old who was arrested in 2022 with a pistol, knife, and cable ties near the house of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and charged with plotting to kidnap the conservative judge.

And no mention of the responsibility of Democrat politicians to stop treating Trump like some uniquely evil threat, a monster to be described in the most hyperbolic terms, a figure of hate used to whip up loyalty on the left like something out of George Orwell’s 1984.

Remember, Democrats spent seemingly every moment of Trump’s first term using a bogus conspiracy theory about Russian collusion using phony intelligence bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to delegitimide a sitting president.

This is a far cry from Biden’s plea that in America, “we resolve our differences at the ballot box”.

For years Democrats have been caught in this fundamental contradiction, saying that “democracy is on the line” in one breath while suggesting that if an election doesn’t go their way, democracy is over.

America won’t heal until this sort of nonsense reasoning is buried.