Donald Trump may be the best thing that ever happened to a Joe Biden presidency. Trump is a ready-made, straight-out-of-the-box distraction for Biden given the media’s obsession with him and the American people’s continued fascination with his antics. If Biden plays his cards right, people will forget he’s even president and he can remain in the background while Trump takes center stage.
Meanwhile, Biden and the radical left will proceed to dismantle the United States as we know it. The left will be busy trying to decide which version of government health insurance should be passed while the right will be busy being outraged by the way the media is treating Trump. Biden will have a fairly straightforward task of remaking the American government.
Aware of the chaos and distraction Donald Trump has proved he can muster, the president-elect and his advisers have developed a strategy they believe is the only way to neutralize the threat: ignore him.
One lesson of Biden’s winning presidential campaign, they say, is that there’s little incentive to engage with Trump, and that his penchant for spectacle is wearing thin with the American people. The tension will reach a head on Jan. 6, when Congress formally ratifies Biden’s victory as Trump’s supporters wage protests both on the streets of Washington, egged on by the president, and within the House and Senate.
Will ignoring Trump as a strategy work? The media tried it in 2015-16 and, needless to say, failed miserably. The more you try to ignore Trump, the larger he gets in the public imagination. One thing is certain: Republicans won’t ignore him — especially Republican primary voters. He will be a combination kingmaker and fundraiser extraordinaire while he leisurely decides whether to run in 2024.
But Trump is a problem that won’t go away for Biden, including the likelihood that if the 2024 GOP nominee isn’t Donald Trump, he will almost certainly have a large role in saying who will be.
The one silver lining for Biden as Trump continues to dominate the news cycle is that there’s nothing that unites Democrats more than hatred for Donald Trump,
While Biden and his aides would prefer Trump go away, some see a silver lining to his continued presence on the national stage. Trump is so toxic to Democrats of all stripes that he helps to unify a party that might otherwise be more openly squabbling over policy and political issues, such as Biden’s appointments, according to one former Biden campaign official who asked not to be identified.
Biden himself predicted to donors in early December that “as Donald Trump’s shadow fades away, you’re going to see an awful lot change.” Biden has predicted that a bipartisan spirit can once again develop in Washington.
Whatever Biden is smoking, I wish he’d share it with us. Trump will stoke the fires of partisanship more than ever and Republicans will do his bidding because it’s in their personal, political interest to do so. The last thing most Republican lawmakers want is to get on Donald Trump’s bad side.
So Biden will metaphorically retreat back into his basement and let Donald Trump have the stage. That may be the biggest mistake of his life.
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