Biden, Back Into the Breach

[Nevilledog]

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Susan Glasser
@sbg1
Much stock was taken today, but we didn’t need the 1/6 anniversary to tell us Republicans are hooked on the Trump drug, and they won’t give it up.

My column:

Biden, Back Into the Breach
A year after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, the President delivered the speech that he never wanted to give.
newyorker.com
5:11 PM · Jan 6, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/joe-biden-back-into-the-breach

No paywall
https://archive.fo/7x7bx

He never mentioned Donald Trump by name. He didn’t have to. Joe Biden gave the speech of his Presidency on Thursday—the first anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol that Trump inspired and incited. In unsparing terms rarely uttered by one leader of the United States about another, Biden castigated the man he referred to sixteen times only as “the former President.” Trump, he said, was not just “a former President”—he’s “a defeated former President.” He “created and spread a web of lies” about the 2020 election. He put his “bruised ego” over the Constitution and the country. He and his followers, in attacking the peaceful transfer of power, “held a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy.”

The Biden who showed up in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall on Thursday bristled with righteous outrage about the rioters who, a year earlier, had paraded Confederate flags there, who had kicked and hit and stomped on police, who had even defecated in the corridors, as they sought to stop the certification of Trump’s defeat. He fact-checked the absurd lies of Republicans who called the insurrection just another tourist outing. And, returning to the theme that animated his 2020 campaign, Biden described the “battle for the soul of America” that Trump and his followers have unloosed, and which is still being joined a year later. “I will stand in the breach,” Biden vowed.

It was a powerful speech, an angry speech. A necessary speech. It was also a speech that Biden wanted very much not to deliver. Because doing so meant acknowledging that, although Trump may be out of office, Trump and Trumpism have not been banished but live on as the dominating, unpleasant reality of American political life, a year after his appalling refusal to accept the election results should have exiled him forevermore from the public space. Whether or not Biden uses Trump’s name, it is hanging over his Presidency.

In the immediate aftermath of last January 6th, Biden still had hopes of healing the breach; now he is forced to admit he must stand and fight in it. No doubt Thursday’s speech invoked the sharpest language that the President has ever used about his predecessor. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, what the political effect on Biden—whose approval ratings now hover in the Trumpian basement—would have been had he delivered it sooner. There is also the matter of whether his words, as pointed and urgent as they were, will carry any political consequence beyond a place of honor in the book of Biden’s tenure.

*snip*

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation

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