What Was the Point of Joe Biden’s MAGA Speech?
Joe Biden’s speech about democracy on Thursday — in which he argued that Trumpism simultaneously has taken over the GOP and is rejected by a majority of Republicans — was emblematic of the confused and incoherent nature of today’s Democratic messaging.
President Joe Biden spoke on “the continued battle for the soul of the nation” in a speech in Philadelphia on Thursday. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
When I first learned about the plans for President Joe Biden’s speech on Thursday, I thought he’d struggle to deliver his message of an extreme and dangerous Republican Party threatening democracy, given he’d spent his first year bending over backward to prove that same party could still be a sane and reasonable governing partner. When I finally watched it, I realized only Joe Biden could deliver a partisan speech whose actual message was about rehabilitating the institution he was meant to be warning people about.
Biden’s major primetime address on Thursday was his latest attempt to grapple with the perils facing democracy at home and abroad, a familiar topic for the president that has previously brought underwhelming returns. Biden’s virtual “Summit for Democracy” last year fell flat, given US democracy’s own troubles and the contradictory, clearly geopolitically driven mess of an invite list. His Summit of the Americas held this year was an even bigger debacle, when similarly incoherent decisions around who was invited and who wasn’t prompted a boycott from some of the region’s major players. Would the third time be a charm for the president?
#NotAllRepublicans
To be fair, a clarion call to protect democracy is not really what Biden was going for last night. This was a campaign speech through and through, as Biden tried his hand at adopting the wider Democratic Party’s electoral strategy this year, aimed at framing the GOP as an increasingly extreme and out-of-control menace to democratic norms — only with a Bidenesque twist.
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