THe Bulwark: Biden Risks Radicalizing the Center
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
ON TUESDAY PRESIDENT BIDEN will speak on antisemitism at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the U.S. Capitol. He better lean in hard—like his re-election, and the future of American democracy, depend on it.
He must speak to the young liberal father in Georgia, a proud and observant Jew who can’t stand Donald Trump but doesn’t know how he will bring himself to vote for Biden this year. It’s the vote of this disheartened Peach State Democrat that Biden must salvage.
But it seems like Biden may have lost the plot. Trying to win with young voters, he is paying off more student debt and is reclassifying marijuana. Yet for every young American screaming at “Genocide Joe,” there are far more voters in the middle who find the normalcy Biden promised four years ago is nowhere in sight.
In 2024, Biden is the chaos candidate. Fair or unfair, in politics perception is reality.
Majorities now approve of Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans—including 42 percent of Democrats—as well as a border wall . And while violent crime has fallen dramatically since the Trump presidency, voters see more disorder. Drugstores didn’t clear their shelves and lock up merchandise because of widespread looting until Biden was in charge. Videos of open-air drug markets and mayhem on subways don’t just make people scared, they make them angry.
There has been record inflation too, and high prices contribute to a pervasive sense of anxiety in the electorate. But Biden would be far better off politically if high prices were the sole challenge he had with voters. Disorder is a drain on the American psyche. And it’s threatening Biden’s re-election, as it leaves voters receptive to the kind of harsh law-and-order appeal Trump prefers.
Yet look at the polls—none of this resonates. There is bipartisan fury over protests and immigration. Trump is running to restore order, and voters have given him a lead.
Last week Biden spoke out on the campus protests, and he said the right things. He disavowed destroying property, vandalism, breaking windows, trespassing, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear, and hate speech. He emphasized that “dissent must never lead to disorder,” and that we are not a lawless country. “We are a civil society, and order must prevail.”
This is the same Biden who spoke out four years ago after riots broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. He said many of the same things at that time: “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting.”
But Biden dragged his feet this time, and took too long to speak up. It seemed a reaction to criticism, not leadership. Biden said it wasn’t a moment for politics, which is laughable. Trump and Republicans got to unite in criticism of the campus protesters, along with the center of the electorate, and blame Biden for the chaos. This is only about politics.
It is not Biden’s fault that cowardly university administrators permitted encampments and barricades, antisemitic rhetoric, taunting and threats and intimidation of Jewish students, disruption of classes and exams and graduation ceremonies for a class of students who didn’t get to have high school graduations in 2020. But it’s repugnant, and unacceptable to a majority of Americans.
The electorate is not only with Israel, against Hamas, it doesn’t empathize with fanatics .
Rep. Jake Auchincloss put it perfectly on Sunday: “The margin of victory for Joe Biden isn’t college protesters on the coasts. It’s Haley voters in the heartland—who aren’t sympathetic to underinformed, overprivileged kids on elite campuses.”
Biden was moved to run for the presidency in 2020 after watching Americans marching through the streets in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” He must call out the left as he called out the right. While Jewish Americans have appreciated Biden’s defense of Israel, they see equivocation in his response to the protests.
THROUGHOUT ALL OF THIS, Biden has also refused to mitigate what may prove to be the worst threat to his re-election. Stunningly, he has taken no discernible action to stabilize the southern border, though immigration is the most important issue to voters. Gallup has recorded this three months in a row, “the longest stretch for this particular issue in the past 24 years.”
The number of border crossings is unprecedented and Chinese migrants are the fastest-growing group attempting entry to the United States. It is not partisan to call this a national security threat. It is also not enough to say there was a great bipartisan bill to fix the border and Trump killed it. Most Americans know Biden hasn’t acted to fix the problem—not before the bill was introduced and not after it was killed.
Biden was inaugurated just fourteen fraught days after January 6th—in a city still locked up by security in the wake of the insurrection. He promised stability and calm. He can reject the tactics of the protesters and fight antisemitism. And he can do something, anything —even if it’s challenged in court—at the border.
But Biden cannot just wish this away. He can lose the kids; they don’t vote much anyway. He cannot lose the center. He must own the chaos. And fix it. Soon.
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This is from the Bulwark, a media organization whose sole reason for existence is to attack Trump. But reality is starting to set in that pandering to the loony left that is currently waging jihad on college campuses has made Biden the chaos candidate in 2024. Biden's been so bad Trump now represents stability and law and order. Good job Biden!
Democrats have a religious belief that abortion is a magic issue that win them elections for the rest of time. They fixate on literally the only issue they enjoy a polling advantage and pretend nothing else exists. But someone at the Bulwark, at least, has learned to think objectively.
Look at these numbers: Majorities now approve of Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans—including 42 percent of Democrats—as well as a border wall . It's not just about doing something at the border. Biden's inactivity has actually shifted the debate so far to the right that Mass Deportation and Trump's border now enjoy majority approval. When Trump won election in 2016 38% supported a border wall and 20% favored mass deportations. Biden's pandering and refusal to do anything at the border has so far radicalized public opinion towards Trump that simply enforcing the law isn't enough at this point.
We live in a degraded country.
If Trump is elected it will be a shame America will never live down. We might as well pray for the apocalypse.
Maybe Biden should just stop pandering to the looniest 15% of Americans and make even the slightest attempt to govern from the center in order to try and prevent that. Even the Bulwark, whose model is also to pander to those same people, has figured out that those loons may control all the left wing money, but they don't actually represent how normal people think.
Is it a surprise that the Bulwark puts out tweets claiming all sorts of unknown things exist that makes Trump look really, really bad if they only came to light? That's been their MO since its' founding.
AB Stoddard wrote that last week.
It's perfectly consistent with the seeded piece and Bulwark's entire editorial line. They love Biden. Hate Trump. The whole point of the seeded article is to serve as a wakeup call to people who agree with them.
When your only defense of Brandon is "But Trruuummmmppppp!!!!!" you have already lost the argument.
Brandon can't stand on his record, the economy, international standing, immigration, or the border. What is left that makes him electable?
Yes we do, and it has gotten decidedly worse in the last 3 and a half years.
Not sure running around with hair on fire or hyperbole is going to help.
How will America be less degraded with the reelection of Biden?
A clown is still a clown.
"There is bipartisan fury over protests and immigration. Trump is running to restore order, and voters have given him a lead."
The Dems are ignoring the concerns of the people and just how bad Biden's dismal record is,
It's not like he even had to build the wall. If he would have just stopped using all his powers to open the borders as wide as possible and instead made some gestures towards securing it he'd have been able to blunt the attack and simply be losing on the issue, rather than being destroyed over it. bill CLinton figured out triangulation thirty years (sista soljuah) when Biden still had a functioning brain so he should know how to do it. A few open border activists attacking him from the left would actually help him.
One thing you have to acknowledge, Biden’s Hitler youth have taken the attention away from his abysmal record on the border and inflation.
That's true. After pissing off moderates over those things, he's now turned to angering anyone who doesn't fly a Hamas flag from their window.
complete nonsense
I agree with every word in the article.
That was a well written speech Biden read the other day and though I applaud Biden for making the speech, I know he made it because his advisors told him that he had to do it or risk alienating more voters. There was one thing that wasn't in the speech: where the antisemitism is coming from, which is the left.