“With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change. Because these folks know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”
Why? Because the commonly held view among liberals, who compose the base of the Democratic Party, is that Trump is not an anomaly or a virus within the broader Republican Party, he is the Republican Party. That attempts, like Biden’s, to say Trump is “other” than the GOP lessens the party’s culpability on its capitulation to the darker forces at work in the President’s message and the party he represents.
It’s not the first time Biden has voiced this Trump-is-terrible-but-Republicans-are-OK sentiment.
That tone and approach from Biden may be what distinguishes him most clearly from the other top-tier candidates running against him for the Democratic nomination. From Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Kamala Harris, each of them sees Trump less as something that has infected the GOP than as the symptom of a party that has been sick for a long time.
The Point: Biden is marching to the message of a very different drummer here. His pitch is that with Trump gone, things — and Republicans — will return to “normal.” Will that sell in today’s mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore Democratic Party?
