President-elect Donald Trump joined President Joe Biden in the White House on Wednesday, with smiles all around and a commitment from Biden to ensure a smooth transition. In a vacuum, this seems as it should be. But when one remembers the hysteria whipped up by Biden about Trump, it’s quite remarkable.
Who could forget that just two years ago, President Biden chose to address the nation in Pennsylvania about the threat Trump and his supporters posed to the nation.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” Biden said.
He continued, “They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”
Fast forward two years, and little had changed rhetorically, with Vice President Kamala Harris denouncing Trump as a “fascist.”
And yet, here we are, with Trump not only winning the election but also winning the popular vote and being greeted warmly by those who called him a threat to democracy and a fascist.
If Trump is indeed a fascist and a threat to American democracy, how could this be? Are Biden and Harris abdicating leadership by not standing up and fighting for democracy? The most reasonable explanation here is that neither Biden nor Harris actually believed what they said and just spewed extreme rhetoric because they thought it sounded convincing.
To be sure, there’s a lot to be unsettled about in what we know for a fact about Trump. This includes the facts that he whipped up a fantasy on the right that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, tried to get Georgia to “find” votes for him to win and watched for hours as his supporters stormed the Capitol to disrupt the count of the electoral college.
The American people, a majority of them in fact, took this into consideration and apparently reasoned that this was not disqualifying behavior on the part of Trump. And, if anything, it is true that the guardrails of the nation held Trump at his worst. Georgia officials denied his request and the electoral count went on over his objections. Unlike what a Hitler would do, he ultimately vacated the office and waited to run again. His base still believes in the conspiracy theory that he was cheated, but that makes them much like the disgruntled Hillary Clinton and Al Gore supporters who previously touted election conspiracies of their own.
Ultimately, Biden and Harris are right to accept the results of the election and are to be commended for showing how a peaceful transfer of power ought to go. The amusing optics of handing off power to a “fascist” aside, this is hopefully a lesson for future politics that dramatic rhetoric only has power when it’s used sparingly. Both parties should try to communicate in a more civil matter instead of spending every moment of every day crying wolf.