Biden Must Keep Defending Democracy Against GOP Hysteria | Opinion

There's a new conventional wisdom taking shape that the Biden administration has been too focused on Jan. 6 and the defense of democracy as a 2024 strategy. The president should pivot to immigration, leave the insurrection in the past and somehow make all former President Donald Trump's legal troubles disappear. Unsurprisingly, this right-wing fantasy is wrong on both the merits and the details. President Biden isn't orchestrating Trump's prosecutions, and he is willing to sign the most GOP-friendly immigration compromise ever offered by Democrats. More importantly, Trump issues fresh threats to American democracy every single day and the Biden campaign would have to be completely out of its mind to ignore them.

The most tendentious objection to Trump's various prosecutions is that they make America a "banana republic." Most people who use this term haven't the slightest clue what it means or refers to, but that's beside the point. The idea is that banana republics are characterized by politically motivated prosecutions of current or former officeholders and that Biden is somehow the puppet master pulling the strings on all of Trump's courtroom challenges.

Let's set aside for the moment the fact that when Republicans aren't crediting him with a devious and meticulously planned legal persecution of Donald Trump, they are saying that he is a doddering old fool, beset by dementia, whose presidency is operated by some unnamed regent. Yet Biden himself has nothing to do with Trump's legal travails and, in fact, can barely bring himself to talk about them at all. Attorney General Merrick Garland, clearly did not want to prosecute Trump for trying to overthrow the American system of constitutional government and would have done nothing about it had Trump not declared his candidacy after the 2022 midterms. That forced Garland to appoint someone who did care, Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Biden also does not control Fulton County District Attorney Fanny Willis, who will put Trump on trial for trying to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. On the contrary, Republicans are trying to get Willis fired or removed from the case. Biden did not make the decision to prosecute Trump for stealing classified materials from the White House and then refusing to return them even when their whereabouts became known. The president also does not appoint or control the Manhattan prosecutors who will soon try Trump for falsifying business records during the 2016 campaign to cover up a scandal involving his alleged tryst with adult film star Stormy Daniels.

To be clear: If Biden were to somehow try to shut down these proceedings, as bad faith actors in the GOP argue he should or fire the prosecutors in charge of them (a power he does not possess, anyway), that would be the banana republic path. That's because for the most part, the abuse of power in corrupt democracies doesn't just involve politically motivated prosecution, but also, and just as often, total impunity for high-level officials and elected leaders who can get away with literally anything because they control the machinery of state. Biden's critics are, in effect, saying that Trump should skate on his 91 felony charges because he's a presidential candidate and that the political preferences of Republican primary voters should be considered more important than the rule of law.

Sorry, but the blind loyalty of Trump's cult is not an argument for Biden to somehow put the kibosh on these prosecutions, which he can't do anyway, or to stop talking about the insurrection or Donald Trump's threat to democracy because it isn't polling well. For one thing, running against coup-plotters and election conspiracists has been a highly successful strategy for Democrats over the past few years, and on top of that Trump and his campaign team and think-tank hangers-on keep coming up with new plans and promises to subvert American democracy. Trump's threat to the political order, therefore, isn't only in the past but rather very much in the present and in the immediate future.

What the griping about Trump's richly deserved prosecutions really reveals is that Republicans are desperate to change the conversation. Their bloviating about the supposedly sad state of the economy gets more preposterous with every passing day of robust GDP growth, low unemployment, falling inflation and booming stock markets. Voters have now repeatedly rejected wholesale the GOP's "anti-woke" moral panic of the month, most recently the ginned-up hysteria over "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)" policies that most normal people have never heard of.

Instead, they want Biden to address the migrant crisis by (I guess?) ordering Democrats in the Senate to support the passage of the House's draconian immigration bill sight unseen. Immigration is the one policy area where Republicans have the clear upper hand in polling. But instead of savvily using that ephemeral leverage to force through an immigration compromise on better terms than panicky Democrats have offered in 20 years, Trump and his allies are actively sabotaging bipartisan efforts in the Senate in the hopes of keeping the issue alive for the election.

Trump is not denying it. "Please blame it on me. Please," he said of this scheming in Las Vegas on Jan. 27. Republican senators have confirmed that Trump is leaning on them to stop negotiations so that he can run on chaos at the border. "This proposal would have had almost unanimous Republican support if it weren't for Donald Trump," one anonymous Republican senator told Politico last week.

So please, spare us the trolling about how Biden should shut up about democracy and focus on the border. Just say what you really mean: Instead of a border compromise signed by Joe Biden you would prefer to give Donald Trump the powers of an emperor so that you can clap clap clap while migrants drown in rivers.

To which Biden and his allies should say: No thanks.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.