The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

When does presidential rhetoric matter?

Some Democrats want Biden to be more like Trump. Huh?

Perspective by
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.
January 18, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EST
During the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Peace Walk in D.C. on Monday, a participant holds a sign urging Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) to support efforts to protect voting rights. (Al Drago/Bloomberg News)

Given the Democrats’ razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress, President Biden has accomplished more than many might have expected when he was elected in November 2020. He secured a stimulus bill in his first hundred days and a bipartisan infrastructure bill last fall. Biden appointed more judges to the bench in his first year than anyone since Ronald Reagan. Unemployment is at an all-time low, and stocks are at an all-time high.

None of this has helped Biden’s lackluster approval numbers, however. Inflation is high, and expectations of what Biden could do as president have been even higher. As the AP’s Steve Peoples notes, “leading voices across Biden’s diverse political base openly decry the slow pace of progress on key campaign promises. The frustration was especially pronounced this past week after Biden’s push for voting rights legislation effectively stalled.”

So what should Biden do? There is standard, inane punditry like “focus more on the economy” as if presidential focus solves the problem of high demand amid supply constraints. (The main thing Biden could pursue is a contractionary fiscal policy, which is never a popular move and might do more harm than good.) Under these circumstances, the best Biden could do on this front is give the appearance of focusing on the economy, perhaps to feed the inane punditry beast.

Slightly more interesting are the calls for Biden to bully his own party more. NPR’s Domenico Montanaro explains that “Democrats’ priorities have mostly been held up by two of their own senators, who continue to balk at what they see as going too far in one way or another.” Hence calls by many for Biden to browbeat Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) into submission — just like Donald Trump used to do when he was president:

Presidents can sometimes cajole and coerce members of their own party, but that seems unlikely to work in this instance. Trump could occasionally discipline members of the GOP caucus by threatening to primary them. That threat holds minimal leverage for Manchin in West Virginia, where Biden commands minimal support.

The 50/50 spit in the Senate means that Biden needs his entire caucus on bills using the reconciliation process or on ending the filibuster, and that consensus does not exist within the caucus. As MSNBC’s Hayes Brown notes, “the gap between Manchin and Sinema on policy in a narrowly divided Senate makes it nearly impossible to win over both, leaving each of them empty-handed — along with the rest of their caucus.”

With this reality, Democrats are left to debate messaging, which led to an interesting Twitter exchange a few days ago:

I have some skin in this debate and would therefore suggest that Robin’s assertion is not entirely accurate. I never bought the claim that Trump’s rhetoric would somehow shift the electorate. Indeed, on an issue-by-issue basis, Trump alienated more voters than he attracted. This is one reason why his party lost control of the House in 2018 and the Senate and White House in 2020.

Where Trump’s rhetoric has mattered, however, is in delegitimizing long-held norms and rules about democracy in the eyes of many Republicans. Polling data shows that more Republicans have gravitated toward Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. According to political scientist Alexander Theodoridis, “not only do [Republicans] say that Biden’s victory was not legitimate, but they endorse several (though not all) specific theories about how fraud was perpetrated.”

While the counterfactual is impossible to prove, I would wager that had Trump conceded defeat, fewer Republicans would hold these beliefs. None of them would have stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Republicans running for secretary of state under the Trumpist banner would not be raking in record amounts of cash.

Joe Biden is a garden-variety Democratic politician trying to implement policies that require significant amounts of buy-in from a wide spectrum of legislators. That is a tall order, and presidential rhetoric does not help much.

Donald Trump wants to watch the world burn. Unfortunately, rabble-rousing rhetoric can make a difference if that is the desired end.