President Joe Biden is in Europe, warning of totalitarian evil and the dangers to democracy. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump is back home, seeking a favor from Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, mulling revenge and trashing US elections.
The former president is making his 2024 opponent’s case — that the West is being challenged by unprecedented threats to the rule of law from hostile forces outside and in.
But Trump’s strength also suggests that the centerpiece of Biden’s trip — an homage on Friday in Normandy to one of former President Ronald Reagan’s greatest speeches — may fall on many deaf ears back in America. The former president is showing in every speech and public appearance that the seduction of demagoguery, the demonization of outsiders and the language of extremism is as potent now as it was before World War II.
The 80th anniversary commemorations 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 have also used their meetings and speeches to draw parallels between Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine and Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg.
There’s nothing new in a modern US president traveling to Europe to invoke the shared history of victory over tyranny. But no other commander in chief has done so after his predecessor tried to destroy democracy to stay in office. The possibility that Biden could lose reelection — and the threat of a return to the chaos Trump inflicted on European allies — has cast an ominous shadow over the trip.
On Friday, Biden will send an unmistakable message by co-opting the legacy of Reagan — one of the greatest Republican presidents — to suggest that his rival is an affront to US and GOP values. In 1984, atop a cliff stormed by US Army Rangers on June 6, 1944, known as the Pointe du Hoc, the 40th president denounced US isolationism. He also invoked the war against Nazism to summon the West to a renewed and ultimately successful Cold War struggle against another form of extremism — Kremlin-style communism. Biden will imply 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 triggered global war.
Can the Gipper win one for Biden?
Biden, who will almost certainly be the last US president to have been born during World War II, is asking Americans to muster the same commitment to democratic values as the greatest generation whose last representatives are now slipping away. “In memory of those who fought here, died here, literally saved the world here, let us be worthy of their sacrifice,” Biden said Thursday, 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 the moment. We stood strong. Our alliances were made stronger. And we saved democracy in our time as well.’”
That a president should have to make such an argument shows how the political climate has shifted since Reagan stood on the same spot 40 years ago and filled many eyes with tears by turning to veterans and saying, “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who scaled the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped win a war.”
Back then, the GOP was an internationalist, pro-democracy party. It proudly boasted about how Reagan won the Cold War until Trump mixed his cocktail of isolationism and populism that looks more kindly on Putin than US allies. It is that defining shift in outlook that may mean that Biden’s speech is an effective piece of political theater but has limited political appeal. The White House and the Biden campaign won’t expect that invoking the spirit of the Gipper will dent Trump’s lock on Republican base voters.
But the president is seeking to win over disaffected national security Republicans nostalgic for the days when a hawkish foreign policy was seen as one leg of the fabled conservative policy stool. And he’s especially seeking to attract some of the tens of thousands of Republicans who voted for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the party’s primary long after she suspended her campaign. The former United Nations ambassador under Trump might have endorsed her former boss and accused Biden of weakness on the global stage. But she’s far more aligned with the current president’s global outlook and disdain for dictators than she is with Trump’s brand of strongman appeasement.
Trump back on the trail
Biden’s visit to Europe has coincided with his predecessor’s return to the campaign trail following his felony conviction last week in a hush money trial in New York. Trump chose the moment to issue his latest opening to Putin, an accused war criminal before whom he genuflected while president. The presumptive GOP nominee insisted that he’d be able to free an imprisoned American reporter.
“Evan Gershkovich, the 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 on Truth Social on Tuesday. “But definitely before I assume office, he will be home, he will be safe. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia will do that for me … and I don’t believe he’ll do it for anyone else.”
This was far from the first time that Trump has sought to demonstrate special influence with Putin. After all, he once said in a news conference in Helsinki that he believed the Russian leader, who was standing beside him, rather than the US intelligence agencies he led, on the question of Kremlin election interference.
Trump’s politicization of the Gershkovich case was notable since it comes after months of quiet US government efforts to free the reporter and another imprisoned American, former Marine Paul Whelan. It raises the possibility that the Russians may simply manipulate any negotiations in the assumption that Trump may give them a better deal or that the Biden administration may be prepared to pay a higher price before the election. If the Kremlin eventually did free the reporter to Trump, it could be a coup for him and would ensure he is in Moscow’s debt.
Trump’s outreach to Putin comes at a time when the Russian president is ostracized from the international community over the barbaric assaults on civilians in Ukraine and as he imposes the greatest threat to the integrity of continental Europe since the war that Biden flew across the Atlantic to commemorate. Using the plight of an American in the ruthless Russian penal system to score political points is also one of the more cynical modern campaign gambits. Russia shrugged off Trump’s remarks on Thursday, saying that the release of Gershkovich would only happen as a result of reciprocity.
After Trump played nice to Putin, the sitting president went out of his way to denounce the Russian leader, who was not invited to the D-Day events despite the Soviet Union’s decisive role in the defeat of Nazism. “He’s not a decent man — he’s a dictator, and he’s struggling to make sure he holds his country together while still keeping this assault going,” Biden told ABC News in an interview. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was there instead.
Meanwhile, Trump’s first campaign event as a felon on Thursday illustrated why the election could be so close. He was before a self-selecting crowd of supporters at a Turning Point Action Town Hall and spelled out a demagogic appeal that is effective with Republican base voters. He renewed his falsehoods about fraud in the last election, insisting he planned to win a mandate in November that was “too big to rig.” 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 fired off searing anti-immigrant rhetoric, much of which was alarmist and false about the crisis on the border but that may prove an effective counterpoint to Biden’s attempt this week to ease his exposure on the issue by massively curtailing asylum claims. The former president has consistently refused to guarantee he will accept the result of November’s election. And several times this week, he has also implied that he would use presidential power to prosecute his political opponents, threatening a fresh assault on the rule of law.
“Well revenge does take 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” that aired Thursday. “You know, sometimes it can.”
At the Thursday town hall, the former president marveled at the fact that many of his questions, from an albeit friendly crowd, were about the high cost of living, the struggle of Arizonans to buy groceries and their perception that they are unsafe because of out-of-control arrivals of undocumented migrants at the border.
This may be the decisive election equation in a nutshell: Trump will wield economic and immigration issues to counter Biden’s warnings that his rival’s anti-democratic and autocratic leanings make him unfit to be president again.
