Biden Promised to ‘Turn the Page’ on Trump. What Went Wrong?
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What does Bidenism mean in the context of Trumpism?
From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. As the second Trump era dawns and the Biden era dims, it's worth asking, what was Bidenism? I think one answer to that begins in 2016, when Donald Trump wins his first presidential election. That win was a rupture for many Democrats. To them, Trump didn't win so much as they lost. How disillusioned did voters need to be with Democratic governance to consider someone like Donald Trump? Jake Sullivan was Hillary Clinton's senior policy advisor in the 2016 campaign. That loss was a rupture for him. And he was one of the Democrats who, after that campaign, embarked on a very public rethinking, a very public effort to get the Democratic Party to admit it was doing something wrong. It had to change. One of Sullivan's main conclusions was a democratic foreign policy become severed from domestic politics in a way that had left both vulnerable.
For too long, Democrats had understood their domestic policies as serving the middle class and their foreign policies as being part of a free trade-centric liberal world order that America led. But the task now was to build a foreign policy that the American middle class saw serving their interests, because if you didn't, they would turn to strongmen like Donald Trump. You had to win democracy here at home before you could ever protect it abroad. After that, Sullivan became a senior policy advisor to Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign. And you could hear Sullivan's thinking echoing in the way Joe Biden pitched his candidacy.
Ladies and gentlemen, political wisdom holds that Americans, the American public, doesn't vote on foreign policy. But I think that's an old way of thinking. In 2019, foreign policy is domestic policy, in my view, and domestic policy is foreign policy.
Biden introduced a slogan that made their project explicit.
I will equip our people to succeed in the new global economy with a foreign policy for the middle class.
Biden won that election, and Jake Sullivan was named National Security Advisor. And from that perch, he was one of the key architects of what I think Bidenism will be understood to have been. A recentering of industrial policy at the center of national strategy. A much more competitive approach to China. A belief that Americans had to see that you were putting their interests first. But if there was one promise that Biden made to the country in that 2020 campaign, and particularly when he won it, it's that he would turn the page on the Trump era. And I think we can say definitively he did not do that. And so if Bidenism was a foreign policy for the middle class meant to drain Trumpism of its appeal, what does it say that Trump ended up coming back stronger than ever?
What then did Bidenism achieve and what did it fail to achieve? And why? I wanted to ask those questions of Jake Sullivan, who I spoke to during his final weeks in the White House. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Jake Sullivan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So I want to begin the conversation right after the 2016 election. You had led policy for Hillary Clinton's campaign, then Donald Trump won. You did some very public soul-searching and rethinking. What was your theory then for why he won and how the Democratic Party needed to recalibrate?
Well, first, during that campaign, I remember distinctly one episode where I went to Ohio to speak to a group of supporters. And in the course of my remarks, I referred to the liberal international order talking about the future of the world and so forth. And somebody came up to me afterwards and said, I don't know what the liberal international order is, but I don't like any of those three words. And that stuck with me. It stuck with me through the primary, where Hillary Clinton took on Bernie Sanders, and it stuck with me through the general, where Hillary Clinton took on Donald Trump. And I think that there's a variety of reasons why Donald Trump won in 2016, and I don't have a unified theory.
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