MAGA Republicans are the worst, Biden says. But he can’t make up his mind whether or not he means all Republicans.
MAGA Republicans are the worst, Biden says. But he can’t make up his mind whether or not he means all Republicans.
J oe Biden is sure of one thing: MAGA Republicans are the most serious threat facing the United States of America today. Biden has taken to repeating “MAGA Republicans” because it is a poll-tested phrase keyed to Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. Such people represent, as he argued in a prime-time presidential address last week, “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” The “Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.” Ahead of that speech, he said that “an extreme MAGA philosophy” was “not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.” In May, he claimed that “this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history, in recent American history.”
Biden’s press secretary, attempting to clarify and defend his remarks in late August, said, “You look at the definition of fascism and you think about what they’re doing in attacking our democracy, what they’re doing in taking away our freedoms, taking away our rights, our voting rights. That is what that is.” She added, on the eve of the Philadelphia speech: “The way that [Biden] sees it, is the MAGA Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party. This is an extreme threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights.”
But here’s a thing Joe Biden is not so sure of: who exactly these “MAGA Republicans” are, or what makes them so extreme. As Charlie and I noted of last week’s Philadelphia speech, Biden couldn’t keep straight even within the speech whether he was denouncing the refusal to accept election results, the use or threat of political violence, or more common Republican policy proposals such as opposing abortion. He’s been doing this for months. At a Pride Month event in June, Biden described state laws against age-inappropriate sex and gender education and transgender drugs and surgeries on children as “ultra-MAGA agenda attacking families and our freedoms.”
The problem with this, of course, is that throwing everybody in the party or in support of its agenda (such as the Florida sex-education bill, which is supported by a majority of Florida Democrats) dissipates the force of the attack, strengthens Trump’s position within the Republican Party, and gives every Republican in the country good reason to believe that the president of the United States has declared them enemies of the state. It does not even make any sense on its own terms. As I’ve argued in contexts ranging from radical Islam to white supremacy to woke ideology and critical race theory to left-wing street violence, if you want to defeat a radical fringe, you try to give them a distinct name and identity that isolates them from their ideological fellow-travelers and sometime-allies. If MAGA Republicans are just all Republicans, there’s no effort to isolate them.
On Friday, when Biden faced blowback for the divisive and ominous nature of his own speech, he backtracked to the narrowest interpretation of the term:
“Do you consider all Trump supporters to be a threat to this country?” a reporter asked Biden at the end of his only scheduled public remarks of the day.
“Come on, look, guys, you keep trying to make that case. I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country,” Biden said. “I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it is used, refuses to acknowledge when an election has been won, insists upon changing the way in which they can count votes, that is a threat to democracy. So I am not talking about anything other than that it is inappropriate and it is not only happening here, but other parts of the world — the failure to recognize and condemn violence whenever it is used for political purposes, failure to condemn any attempt to manipulate election outcomes, failure to acknowledge when an election has been won or lost.” [Emphasis added.]
That didn’t last very long. On Sunday, Biden tweeted that “MAGA proposals are a threat to the very soul of this country.” Proposals? On Monday, Biden equated MAGA with Wall Street: “We understand something that MAGA Republicans in Congress don’t. Wall Street didn’t build this country. Working people did.” On Tuesday, he tweeted, “Not every Congressional Republican is a MAGA Republican. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. But an extreme set of MAGA Republicans in Congress have chosen to take us backwards.” This, once again, appears to equate “MAGA Republicans” with anyone who won’t vote for Joe Biden’s agenda.
This is entirely incoherent. Maybe Biden genuinely can’t keep straight in his head anymore what he’s talking about from one day to the next, but you’d think that somebody around him is in charge of putting out a disciplined message that doesn’t reverse itself on a daily basis. But with this White House, that frequently seems to be an unrealistic expectation.