The speech Joe Biden gave in Pittsburgh this past Monday gives me some hope that the Democratic presidential candidate and his advisors grasp the threat of Donald Trump’s incitement of violence and encouragement of chaos as a path to re-election. Biden’s appearance in Pittsburgh appears to have been spurred by worries among some high-ranking Democrats that Trump’s efforts to convince Americans the nation is under attack by anarchists and left-wing radicals was beginning to take purchase among voters. In turn, Trump campaign officials have tried to spin the speech as a successful effort to distract Biden from his campaign focus on the economy and coronavirus. Yet, as John Stoehr argues persuasively, the idea that Biden’s speech was somehow a victory for Trump doesn’t really make much sense.
By directly addressing the president’s role in inciting violence, Joe Biden in fact engaged on a front that he cannot ignore, and on which the president is deeply vulnerable among the majority of voters. The speech is in fact as thorough and persuasive an indictment of Trump’s deranged cultivation of violence as I could have hoped for, alongside an enumeration of the ways in which Trump has failed at his job. These early lines are savage and spot-on:
This president, long ago, forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it. He may believe mouthing the words law and order makes him strong. But his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is. Does anyone believe there’ll be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?
As I mentioned yesterday, the Democrats need to make clear that Donald Trump’s incitement of right-wing militias to violence against their fellow Americans is an unforgivable and murderous attack on the safety and political rights of the citizenry. I would hazard that are even some Trump supporters who do not like the idea of the president and sympathetic police deputizing white supremacist militias to terrorize their fellow Americans. Linking such an appeal to the fact of Trump’s weakness isn’t just a way to rattle Trump’s cage; it’s a reflection of the reality that given his failures with covid, Trump now sees no other way to win than to foment chaos in the streets and hope he scares enough voters into his camp. Biden’s speech brings together Trump’s failures and these scare efforts:
I look at this violence and I see lives and communities and the dreams of small businesses being destroyed and the opportunity for real progress on issues of race and police reform and justice being put to the test. Donald Trump looks at this violence and he sees a political lifeline. Having failed to protect this nation from the virus that has killed more than 180,000 Americans so far, Trump posts an all caps tweet, screaming, “Law and order,” to save his campaign.
Exposing Trump’s claims to be a “law and order” president as entirely the opposite, Biden is showing that his campaign will not accept or compete on the false narrative of social chaos that Trump has promoted.
In the Stoehr piece I mentioned, he argues that the case Biden made is in fact so effective that the true major threat to it is the media’s unwillingness to let go of a general misunderstanding that Trump’s “chaos in the streets” narrative is the decisive one for voters. Rather, Americans are actually more worried about things like covid that affect them personally, as opposed to alleged violence in the streets in far-away cities, and Stoehr cites recent polling to back this up.
But beyond this point is another one that Stoehr and others have discussed many times before, but bears repeating because it is so central to our crisis. Donald Trump’s outrageous encouragement of violence as a means to gain votes isn’t just something that should be reported as a challenge that might trip up Joe Biden; it’s an actual offense against our democracy that should be the framework for all future reporting on Trump’s candidacy. No news story about the state of the race should leave out the basic overriding fact that the man running for re-election of our democracy has declared war on our democracy. This is not biased reporting, or putting the thumb on the scales for Joe Biden. News organizations in a democracy have a duty to protect that democracy; it is slur and self-serving tactic of right-wing political forces to call it bias when reporters refuse to accept as normal the destruction of democratic norms. Put simply: when a president encourages violence against Americans, that is the inescapable story, because that is an inescapable crisis for our country.