There’s a detail in a Wall Street Journal profile of commerce secretary Gina Raimondo that further illuminates Dan’s point that Joe Biden’s definition of “MAGA Republicans” expands or contracts, depending upon whatever he needs at the moment.
As a $52 billion bill to bolster semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. approached a critical juncture, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo reached out to some unusual figures to cultivate support in Congress: former Trump administration national security officials.
A member of her security detail told her that H.R. McMaster, national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, praised her on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Ms. Raimondo brought in Mr. McMaster and three other former Trump officials to talk up the importance of semiconductors to national defense alongside Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
The event “defined competition with China as a nonpartisan issue,” Mr. McMaster recalled. The legislation passed the Senate four months later with 17 Republicans in support.
Those other Trump administration officials were former deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development Bonnie Glick, former undersecretary of state Keith Krach, former deputy national-security adviser Matthew Pottinger, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who served as a commissioner on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence during the Trump years.
Are H. R. McMaster and the other Trump administration officials “MAGA Republicans”? They would seem to be by any reasonable standard; after all, they left private-sector jobs to work for Donald Trump and to enact his agenda.
But MAGA Republicans represent “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” in Biden’s words. Why would anyone on the Biden team be asking them for help? Why would anyone on the Biden team accept their help?
Is it that by helping the Biden administration persuade lawmakers to pass one of their legislative priorities, those Trump officials wash away their sins of MAGA-dom?
What Raimondo did was once normal and smart politics; when someone on the other side of the aisle agrees with one of your priorities, you form a temporary alliance and hope your new ally can persuade his usual political brethren.
But once you start labeling your opponents semi-fascist, malicious, threatening to the country, and evil, as President Biden recently did, it not only makes it hard to make any new bipartisan alliances; it also makes it seem that, having made bipartisan alliances in the past, you’ve gotten in bed with the devil.
There’s no moral or political coherence to Biden’s position now. . . . But that’s never been an insurmountable obstacle to him in the past.