A chunk of President Joe Biden’s first year in office was defined by his belief in bipartisanship — and, in the view of many of in his own party, acting as if his predecessor didn’t mean what he did to and about the GOP
That changed on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack. Biden called this “an inflection point in history,” and it might mark something similar when it comes to his presidency.
Without once mentioning him by name, Biden took direct aim at former President Donald Trump and his movement. He made it personal: “a defeated former president” whose “bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution.
“He can’t accept he lost,” Biden said.
It left Republicans complaining that Biden was injecting partisanship into a day of solemnity. But given the context of what happened a year ago — not to mention the near-total GOP boycott of the day’s ceremonies at the Capitol — those are hits the Biden White House is willing to take.
Trump on Thursday churned out a series of misleading and outright false statements that in part served to prove Biden’s point. If Jan. 6, 2021, was the day democracy was almost toppled, Jan. 6, 2022, was the day the current president announced that his mission was to confront divisions that are too important to try to heal.
Implicit in much of the way Jan. 6 has been commemorated is the fact that as bad as it was, it could have been far worse. Biden’s signal to his party from here is that the only way to confront Trumpism is by taking on Trump all over again.
The work of protecting a democracy in peril is easier said than done, and Biden has his work cut out for him.
“I did not seek this fight brought to this Capitol one year ago today, but I will not shrink from it either. I will stand in this breach, I will defend this nation and I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of democracy,” Biden said Thursday from the Capitol’s Statuary Hall.
The remarks by the president, vice president and a host of other Democratic lawmakers Thursday emphasized the through-line between election lies fomented by Trump and his allies, the Capitol attack, restrictive voting legislation passed in states across the country and the push to pass federal voting reforms.
