In recent weeks, US president Joe Biden has signed on to a familiar gambit. As his presidency has struggled after he sabotaged his own policy agenda, Biden is taking a page from the classics with a preelection right-wing turn.

At the start of the year, Biden replaced outgoing, progressive-curious chief of staff Ron Klain — who showed some inkling he understood we were living in different times from his and Biden’s heyday and felt the need to give progressives at least a token seat at the table — with former private equity maven Jeff Zients, maybe best known for his disastrous spearheading of the administration’s pandemic response. Given that Zients’s resume was defined by his love of austerity and corporate favors, it was a foreboding hint that the president may have tired of the progressive warrior image he had stoked for the first half of his term.

That hint seemed to have been confirmed by several recent moves by the administration. First, Biden abruptly reversed his pledge to oppose a GOP bill aimed at the District of Columbia’s recently passed rewriting of its criminal code, in the kind of classic tough-on-crime posturing that Biden himself helped pioneer several decades ago. The reality of the rewrite was nowhere near the portrait painted by cynical, fearmongering Republicans. But no matter: Biden folded quickly in the face of right-wing pressure and joined the GOP’s opposition to the rewrite. Long gone was the Biden of summer 2020, who saw political benefit in sharing photos of himself kneeling with black protesters and promising to “listen.”