The media can’t stop mentioning Donald Trump’s name even though he lost his job almost a month ago….
The guy sponsored a protest and assault on the office of the Congress….
While Republican lawmakers have ducked Trump’s guilt in a possible insurrection?
President Biden will NOT.…
Make no mistake Biden needs Trump to fade away….
He needs to put the American government back together ….
But one would image that almost ALL day, EVERY Day he keeps hearing Trump’s ineptitude and lies coming at him from ALL directions…
It IS only fair that Biden make sure people KNOW what mess the ‘former’ President has left things….And how he IS working to correct those things….And now that the show trial is over?
Biden and the Democrats can fully focus on the future….
Donald Trump’s acquittal in his second impeachment trial marks a new beginning for Joe Biden’s presidency, erasing a weekslong shadow that has hung over the White House.
But while Biden may now have the chance to move past his predecessor, he won’t take it.
Biden and his aides will continue to use Trump as a foil for the “foreseeable future” as they seek to contrast the two presidents’ policies to build support for the White House’s agenda, according to three people familiar with the situation.
Biden’s team learned a lesson from 2009, when President Barack Obama and Biden, then vice president, came to believe that they’d failed to defend their policies forcefully enough against criticisms from Republicans, including former Vice President Dick Cheney. Those criticisms, they believe, contributed to Democrats’ enormous losses in the 2010 midterm elections.
“You have to make sure you are making it clear that you are contrasting the person and the policies,” a longtime Biden adviser said. “In some ways, American voters picked Biden to be the opposite of Trump.”
Since the inauguration, Biden and his aides have criticized the Trump administration for failing to build up and quickly distribute the coronavirus vaccine, refusing to hold Russia accountable for a “range of malign activities” from election interference to hacking and for enacting “immoral policies” to limit immigration.
At the same time, the White House has tried to avoid engaging in the name calling Trump was known for when he was president, in keeping with Biden’s campaign promise to take a less divisive political approach. Oftentimes, aides decline to even utter Trump’s name, referring instead to the “previous administration” or “former president” (a term Trump eschews in favor of “45th president”).
This week, as Washington was consumed by the impeachment trial, White House aides dodged question after question — declining to say whether the proceeding was constitutional, whether Trump should be convicted, or whether Biden would receive regular updates on the Senate action.
“They’re trying to draw a governmental contrast, a moral contrast, a values contrast,” said Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary for Obama who is in touch with the Biden White House. “Yet at the same time, they’ll try to keep themselves above the day-to-day of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. I just don’t think that helps many people besides Donald Trump.”….
Yet there WILL BE some things of Trump that Biden is sure to keep….
The White House explicitly committed to keeping the Space Force last week, after press secretary Jen Psaki raised eyebrows by dismissing a question about the service. Trump signed legislation to establish the Space Force as the sixth military branch at the end of 2019. The concept is rooted in a bipartisan proposal made by House lawmakers in 2017, but Trump’s effort to market it as a major accomplishment embroiled the service in controversy.
Biden is also expected to take advantage of new labor enforcement tools under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was solidified early last year after months of negotiations and represents another rare bipartisan legislative accomplishment of the previous president.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of continuity there,” said Edward Alden, an expert on economic competitiveness and trade at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The USMCA was a big bipartisan success.”
Still, Biden’s overall approach to economic and foreign policy issues is already drawing sharp contrast with Trump. Biden has emphasized the importance of alliances and partnerships in dealing with issues from confronting China to addressing climate change to defeating the coronavirus pandemic….
image…Slate Magazine….Photos by Anna Moneymaker-Pool/ Chip Somodevilla/Getty