The former vice president portrays Trump as a temporary blip, while other Democrats see a deeper malaise.
The key word in Joe Biden’s announcement video is “aberrant.” If Donald Trump only serves one term, Biden declares, “I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time.”
Before Trump, the former vice president implies, a moral consensus reigned. America, he declares, “is an idea”—an idea that “everyone is treated with dignity” and which “gives hate no safe harbor” and “instills in every person in this country the belief that no matter where you start there’s nothing you can’t achieve if you work at it.” That, Biden explains, is “what we believe”—or at least we did, before Trump came along.
That’s a fundamentally different message from the one being peddled by Biden’s key competitors, who see Trump not as an historical aberration but as the outcome of a long historical decline. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both depict Trump as a manifestation of the class war that the ultra-rich have been waging since the Reagan era; in their telling, this war created the economic insecurity that made working-class whites susceptible to Trump’s racist scapegoating, and Trump is escalating the conflict by handing over the government to corporate and financial interests. Pete Buttigieg, meanwhile, attributes Trump’s rise to a America’s long-standing failure to meet the challenges of globalization, a failure that has left Americans susceptible to “the myth that we can stop the clock and turn it back” to an era before automation and outsourcing.
