Analysis: Biden defends democracy in Europe and Trump weakens it in the USA

President Joe Biden is in Europe, warning of totalitarian evil and the dangers to democracy. The possible candidate of the Republican party, Donald Trump, is back in the country, seeking a favor from Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, plotting revenge and defaming the US elections.

The former president is making his opponent’s case for 2024 – that the West is being challenged by unprecedented threats to the rule of law from hostile forces both external and internal.

But Trump’s strength also suggests that the centerpiece of Biden’s trip — a tribute Friday in Normandy to one of former President Ronald Reagan’s greatest speeches — could fall on many deaf ears in America. The former president demonstrates, in every speech and public appearance, that the seduction of demagogy, the demonization of foreigners and extremist language are as potent now as they were before the Second World War.

Commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion that led to the liberation of Europe have turned into a rallying point for Western leaders warning that the darkest forces of political extremism are awakening. They also used their meetings and speeches to draw parallels between Putin’s vicious attack on Ukraine and Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg.

There is nothing new about a modern U.S. president traveling to Europe to evoke the shared history of victory over tyranny. But no other leader has done this after his predecessor tried to destroy democracy to stay in office. The possibility of Biden losing reelection — and the threat of a return to the chaos that Trump inflicted on European allies — cast an ominous shadow over the trip.

On Friday (7), Biden sent an unequivocal message by co-opting the legacy of Reagan – one of the greatest Republican presidents – to suggest that his rival is an affront to the values ​​of the United States and the Republican Party. In 1984, atop a cliff stormed by U.S. Army Rangers on June 6, 1944, known as Pointe du Hoc, the 40th American president denounced U.S. isolationism. He also invoked the war against Nazism to call on the West for a renewed and ultimately successful fight against another form of extremism – Kremlin-style communism. Biden implied that Trump, with his “America First” foreign policy, attacks on the integrity of the free and fair 2020 election and use of extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric that echoes that of the Nazis, is summoning the same forces that sparked the global war.

Can Reagan lead Biden to victory?

Biden, who will almost certainly be the last U.S. president to be born during World War II, is calling on Americans to bring together the same commitment to democratic values ​​as the greatest generation whose last representatives are now moving away. “In memory of those who fought here, died here, literally saved the world here, let us be worthy of their sacrifice,” said Biden on Thursday (6), surrounded by the graves of more than 9,000 Americans. “Let us be the generation that, when history is written about our time – in 10, 20, 30, 50, 80 years from now – it will be said: ‘When the moment came, we met it. We stand firm. Our alliances have become stronger. And we saved democracy in our time too.”

That a president needs to make such an argument shows how the political climate has changed since Reagan stood in the same spot 40 years ago and brought tears to many eyes when he addressed veterans and said, “These are the boys from Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who climbed the cliffs. These are the champions who helped liberate a continent. These are the heroes who helped win a war.”

At that time, the Republican Party was an internationalist and pro-democracy party. He proudly boasted about how Reagan won the Cold War until Trump mixed his cocktail of isolationism and populism, which looks more sympathetically on Putin than on US allies. It’s this shift in perspective that could mean Biden’s speech is an effective piece of political theater, but has limited political appeal. The White House and the Biden campaign do not expect that evoking the spirit of Ronald Reagan will undermine Trump’s blockade of Republican base voters.

But the president is trying to win over Republicans unhappy about national security, nostalgic for the days when an aggressive foreign policy was seen as a leg on the legendary stool of conservative politics. And he is especially seeking to appeal to some of the tens of thousands of Republicans who voted for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley in the party’s primary long after she suspended her campaign. The former United Nations ambassador under Trump may have endorsed her former boss and accused Biden of weakness on the global stage. But it is much more in line with the current president’s global vision and disdain for dictators than with Trump’s brand of appeasement authoritarian style.

Trump back on the campaign trail

Biden’s visit to Europe coincided with his predecessor’s return to the campaign trail following his conviction last week in a New York trial. Trump chose the moment to issue his latest overture to Putin, an accused war criminal to whom he bowed as president. The presumptive Republican nominee insisted that he would be able to free an imprisoned American reporter.

“Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is being held by Russia, will be released almost immediately after the election,” Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social on Tuesday. “But definitely before he takes office, he will be home, he will be safe. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia will do this for me… and I don’t believe he will do it for anyone else.”

This was not the first time that Trump tried to demonstrate special influence with Putin. After all, he once said during a press conference in Helsinki that he believed the Russian leader, who was on his side, rather than the US intelligence agencies he led, on the issue of election interference in the Kremlin.

Trump’s politicization of the Gershkovich case was notable as it comes after months of peaceful efforts by the U.S. government to free the reporter and another imprisoned American, former Marine Paul Whelan. This raises the possibility that the Russians could simply manipulate any negotiations on the assumption that Trump might give them a better deal or that the Biden administration might be prepared to pay a higher price before the election. If the Kremlin finally releases the reporter to Trump, it could be a coup for him and will ensure that he remains indebted to Moscow.

Trump’s contact with Putin comes at a time when the Russian president is isolated from the international community by the barbaric attacks on civilians in Ukraine and when he poses the greatest threat to the integrity of continental Europe since the war that Biden crossed the Atlantic to commemorate. Using an American’s suffering in the cruel Russian penal system to score political points is also one of the most cynical campaign tricks of the modern era. Russia ignored Trump’s comments on Thursday, saying Gershkovich’s release would only happen as a result of reciprocity.

After Trump appeared friendly with Putin, the incumbent president made a point of denouncing the Russian leader, who was not invited to the D-Day events, despite the Soviet Union’s decisive role in defeating Nazism. “He’s not a decent man — he’s a dictator, and he’s fighting to make sure he keeps his country together while still carrying on this attack,” Biden told ABC News in an interview. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was there in his place.

Meanwhile, Trump’s first campaign event as a felon on Thursday illustrated why the election could be so close. He stood before a crowd of select supporters at a Turning Point Action Town Hall and made a demagogic appeal that is effective with Republican base voters. He renewed his lies about fraud in the last election, insisting that he planned to win a mandate in November that was “too big to be rigged.” He attacked the legal system following his conviction by a jury of his peers, baselessly insisting that the verdict was “rigged”.

And in the border state of Arizona, he unleashed anti-immigration rhetoric, much of which was alarmist and false about the border crisis, but which could prove an effective counterpoint to Biden’s attempt this week to sharply reduce asylum claims. . The former president has consistently refused to guarantee that he will accept the result of the November election. And several times this week, he also hinted that he would use presidential power to prosecute his political opponents, threatening a new attack on the rule of law.

“Well, revenge takes time, I will say that, and sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest,” Trump said during an interview with “Dr. Phil Primetime,” which aired on Thursday. “You know, sometimes it can.”

At Thursday’s Town Hall, the former president marveled that many of his questions, from a friendly crowd, were about the high cost of living, Arizonans’ struggle to afford groceries and their perception of who are insecure due to the uncontrolled arrival of undocumented immigrants at the border.

This could be the decisive electoral equation in a nutshell: Trump will use economic and immigration issues to counter Biden’s warnings that his rival’s antidemocratic and autocratic tendencies make him unfit to be president again.

This content was originally created in English.

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