President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event in Atlanta, Ga. on on March 9.Megan Varner/Getty Images
With the Super Tuesday primaries in the rear-view mirror and a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden set in motion, the U.S. presidential race now shifts into the normal rhythms of any election campaign. There will be barnstorming, promises, gaffes, polls, lies, half-truths and invented controversies, all of them devouring the front pages until the vote on Nov. 5.
But this is anything but a normal election: it is, as Mr. Biden is trying to convince voters, a battle for the soul of the world’s oldest democracy. A victory for Mr. Biden would be victory for liberal democratic values around the globe.
America, the country whose founders vowed never to be ruled by a king again, is on the verge of electing a man who openly admires autocrats, and who vows to use the White House to wage war on his political opponents, the justice department, the courts, undocumented immigrants and anyone or anything else he refers to as “enemies of the state,” “monsters” and “vermin.”
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible … whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and to destroy the American dream,” Mr. Trump said in November.
Just last Friday, Mr. Trump welcomed to his Florida home Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader,” he said. And yet Mr. Orbán’s nationalist government has silenced the free press in Hungary, rejigged election boundaries to favour his party, given him direct control over who can be appointed as a judge and banned the teaching of subjects in universities that don’t suit its ideology.
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Orbán vilify immigration as a threat to their respective countries, Mr. Trump going as far as saying last year that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” – an echo of Nazi propaganda.
Both are also sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin – Mr. Orbán explicitly, and Mr. Trump implicitly through his opposition to U.S. aid for Ukraine.
As we’ve said before, Mr. Trump is bluntly telling the world who he is. The world is listening; last November, the British magazine The Economist said the greatest threat facing the rules-based international order and the global economy in 2024 is the potential election of man who incited a violent mob that attacked Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the 2020 vote result.
But if the world is paying attention, many voters in the United States are either unaware or indifferent, or actively embrace Mr. Trump’s plan to root out the “corrupt, rotten and sinister forces trying to destroy America,” as he put it when he launched his campaign last year.
Polls continue to put Mr. Trump ahead of Mr. Biden, in particular on the economy, even though the U.S. has rebounded remarkably from the pandemic. Inflation has been contained, unemployment is at a record low and stock markets are surging.
In response, Mr. Biden is staking his re-election on fighting off the threat posed by Mr. Trump. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time,” Mr. Biden said at a rally on the eve of third anniversary of the failed Jan. 6 insurrection.
It’s a line of attack he repeated in his well received State of the Union speech last week. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time” – a reference to Mr. Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine and the rise of illiberal autocrats like Mr. Orbán.
The world should be grateful that Mr. Biden has chosen to make this his ballot-box issue. The stakes are high but the risk is worth it. American voters had the sense to reject Mr. Trump after seeing how he behaved in office after the 2016 election, and they can do it again.
Above all, if Mr. Trump and the neo-autocratic movement he represents are to be stopped, it needs to be done at the ballot box. A court decision or criminal conviction that prevented the much-indicted Mr. Trump from running would be a blow to him, but Trumpism would continue.
A Biden victory, on the other hand, would be a powerful signal to the U.S. and the rest of the world – Mr. Putin included – that autocrats are yesterday’s men.