WASHINGTON — One theme ran through Joe Biden’s inaugural address in January 2021: “unity.”
Biden has said it nearly a dozen times, signaling that his driving ambition will be to bridge partisan divides so entrenched that his predecessor, Donald Trump, broke with tradition and didn’t hesitate to appear at the Capitol to take the oath.
“We must end this uncivil war pitting red against blue, rural and urban, conservative and liberal,” Biden said.
Four years later, the war is still going on. As Biden is up for re-election, the nation is mired in the same vicious tribal conflict that has been festering in America for generations.
He is not giving up, allies say, and if he wins a second term, he could seek to appoint Republicans to Cabinet posts and redouble efforts to make America’s political discourse less toxic. But it is not so easy.
A Vanderbilt University study measuring national unity shows steady descent Since the early 1980s, with a small uptick since Biden took office, only to soften slightly after Trump’s departure as the number of people who “strongly disapprove” of the president, said John Gree, the Vanderbilt political science professor who created the index.
In a focus group last week, the 46-year-old Georgia Republican said the reason he switched from Trump to Biden in 2020 was the hope that a Biden victory could lead to greater national unity. Disappointed by what he saw, he now plans to switch back to Trump.
“I left thinking the world wouldn’t be so divided,” he said. Busy/Sago as part of it Swing Picker Project. “Everything will get better; people would do well. And we are back in the same boat again. Worse, to be honest.”
For years, Democratic officials have predicted that the far-right movement that has taken over Republican politics would burn itself out — the fever would subside when a series of election losses forced a reckoning within the GOP.
“I think the fever is going to break,” Biden, then vice president, said after Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012.
“You’re going to see an epiphany happen among a lot of my Republican friends.” Biden said in 2019 During the presidential campaign in New Hampshire.
It never happened. There was no epiphany, no civic awakening. Trump was voted out of office in 2020, but the man and his MAGA movement are on the verge of taking back power. It’s Trump runs evenly With Biden in national polls.
His aides hold leadership positions in Congress and are among its most prominent members. One of them, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, “national divorce“Last year, the nation was divided into red and blue states.
Far from bringing a national rapprochement, Trump’s defeat could rival the political violence of Jan. 6, as his angry supporters protested an outcome that neither he nor they see as the prudence of credible, current and former officials.
Trump himself does not rule out the possibility of violence if he loses in November, by his supporters.
“I think we will win,” he said last month. “And if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on a fair election.”
Former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota likened the national mood to “a metastasizing political cancer.”
“I’m worried about what will happen if Trump loses and whether there will be a repeat of January 6,” he said.
One difference, of course, is that Trump won’t be in the White House in the weeks after this election. Regardless of the outcome, Biden will still have until Jan. 20 to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” and be required to do so.
Biden has not given up on the notion that the parties could reach some kind of détente. People familiar with the matter say he has not abandoned the idea that a victory in November could push Republicans to abandon Trumpism.
They point to significant legislative victories under Biden as proof that cross-party deals are possible even in the current climate where vital national interests are at stake. He recently signed a bill that sent billions of dollars Aid to Ukraine Thus, it can fend off a Russian invasion that threatens the post-World War II order.
Allies argue that if Biden wins in November, he will be better positioned to reduce polarization. Had he been able to resolve partisan animosities without worrying about backlash from his liberal base, he might have played a different historical role. A product of a more collaborative era in Washington, Biden wants consensus, and some who have worked with him see him as well-suited for this difficult time.
“President Biden is uniquely qualified to find ways to work together to get things done,” a senior White House official said. “Everything about his presidential leadership is consistent with this kind of effort.”
Allies expect Biden to appoint Republicans to higher-level positions in Obama’s attempted administration in the new term. He retained Republican President George W. Bush’s nominee Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, and later appointed former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to that position. Ray LaHood, a prominent Republican representative from Illinois, was Obama’s first transportation secretary. But Biden kept the plum Cabinet jobs for staunch Democrats.
“I think there’s a good chance Joe Biden will have a Republican in his cabinet if he’s re-elected,” Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden confidante and former Democratic senator from Delaware, said in an interview.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the memo.
Blaming Biden for the ongoing animosity between the parties may be too simplistic, officials argued. He took office two weeks after rioting at the Capitol disrupted a peaceful transfer of power. To this day, Trump insists the 2020 election was stolen, saying Biden is not legally in office.
It’s hard to find a willing partner if the other party believes you’re a cheater without proof or is confused. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., mocked Biden’s age during difficult budget negotiations last year and offered to take it.soft foodTo the White House for dinner.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said, “Despite his best efforts, it is very difficult for the president to achieve this goal of national unity when Donald Trump continues to run for president and divide the country.” “It’s not that defeating Donald Trump will result in harmony in the country. “I don’t want to overstate it, but I think that by defeating Donald Trump in this election, we will remove some of the poison from the national debate.”
Still, Biden may have missed some ripe opportunities to defuse tensions and project a more bipartisan image, others said. Former Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger is a Republican who has disavowed Trump by serving on a congressional panel investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He is an independent-minded Republican who has gone into exile in the Trump era. Bilateral cooperation in Washington is more difficult.
Kinzinger praised Biden for “doing more than I expected and more than people gave him credit for” in promoting bipartisanship. According to him, in January, an employee of the Biden campaign called him and suggested that they would use him in the campaign after Trump’s opponent, Nikki Haley, dropped out of the race. But Haley ended her campaign more than two months ago, and he still hasn’t heard from Biden’s world, he said.
“There is 20% of Republican voters Kinzinger said there are still people who voted for Nikki Haley in the GOP primary race. “These are attainable people!
“I’m not saying this because I need an ego boost. I say this because what the hell they are [the Biden campaign] does?’
For a variety of reasons, Republicans of all political stripes believe that Biden should have pulled the brakes and blocked efforts to hold Trump accountable for the alleged crimes.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle informed about this Last week, Biden could have helped himself and hurt Trump politically by seeking a pardon from federal charges and relying on New York prosecutors to end the hush-hush case against Trump.
“You can agree with that, but if I were President Biden, when the Justice Department indicted him, I would immediately pardon him,” Romney said. “Why? Well, because that makes me President Biden, the big guy, and the guy I pardoned the little guy.”
McCarthy said Biden has had a cache of goodwill on Capitol Hill since he was vice president, often playing the role of Obama’s deal-maker. It began to dry up before Biden was sworn in, McCarthy said in an interview.
“I think he started and missed the opportunity. I think that when he was elected, he watched the Democrats go and impeach Trump again,” said McCarthy, who once harshly criticized Trump’s behavior on January 6. “He should have intervened when the country saw it. and said, “No, we won’t do that.”
On politics, McCarthy, who was ousted as speaker by right-wing forces in the GOP caucus last year, said Biden had bowed to pressure from the left-wing faction within the Democratic Party, giving him little room to cut deals with Republicans.
Noting Biden’s aggressive efforts erase federal student loan debtMcCarthy said: “If he hadn’t had such a hard time with young people in his party, would he have done the student loan forgiveness again and again?”
When a country is so deeply divided, there can only be so much a president can do on his own. A Pew Research Center The percentage of Republicans and Democrats who think each other is “immoral” has increased since 2016 in the middle of Biden’s 2022 term, the study found.
Officials and political scientists said there are some constructive steps Biden and the nation could consider. Daschle suggested that if re-elected, Biden should invite congressional leaders from both parties to Camp David, Maryland, during the December recess to see if they can craft a joint agenda and then make the announcement during his State of the Union address. New Year.
Others said there needed to be deeper, structural changes in the way the nation governed itself. Pippa Norris, a comparative political scientist at Harvard University, suggests an expanded representation system to ensure that smaller, fringe parties at least have a voice in Congress.
Germany and New Zealand are using this approach, which may ease the frustration of disenfranchised voters angry at America’s winner-takes-all, two-party tradition.
As president, Trump has devoted little energy to reuniting the country. Biden would at least try if given another term, allies argue.
“I know what kind of person Biden is,” said Hagel, who served with Biden in both the Senate and the Obama administration. “And in your opinion, this [defusing partisan tensions] may be his greatest contribution to this country when he leaves office.”