How Biden is neutralizing the Big Lie

If you spend time on Twitter (I won’t use its official name), you have probably encountered what my friend Magdi Jacobs calls “doomerism.” Generally speaking, that’s an attitude arising from the most extreme ends of the continuum, according to which nothing really matters in human society except the ability of one group to dominate another. It’s nihilism from the far right and the far left. Both enable tyrants like Donald Trump.

I’ll talk more about doomerism another time. For now, I want to recognize my own recent reaction to it, which has been a generally positive attitude toward this year’s election. There are a million reasons to be scared to death about the possibility of Trump being president again, but perhaps because I’ve been recovering from the covid, I find myself looking for at least one good reason, in the face of all this doomerism, to be hopeful.

Oddly enough, I found it in Trump’s Big Lie. As I was thinking about his endless lying about voter fraud, it occurred to me that he’s subliminally communicating something that many of us are not hearing, on account of so many of us being so scared to death. Trump is saying that “I know I can’t win, otherwise, I wouldn’t be explaining why I’m about to lose.”

I wrote that piece Thursday. I thought it was pretty good. By Friday, something happened to make me think that it was very good. According to CNN, Joe Biden has decided that a major piece of his campaign strategy is calling Trump a “loser.” He’s been using that word every day since.

He was in South Carolina over the weekend, campaigning in advance of that state’s Democratic primary election. To an audience of supporters, Biden said: “You are the reason I'm president. You are the reason Kamala Harris is a historic vice president. You are the reason Donald Trump is a loser. And you are the reason we are going to win and beat him again.”

Nearly a month ago, also in South Carolina, in remarks on the third anniversary of the J6 insurrection, the president said: “Let’s be clear about the 2020 election. Trump exhausted every legal avenue available to him to overturn the election — every one. But the legal path just took Trump back to the truth that I had won the election and he was a loser.”

After Trump won the Iowa caucuses, Biden said: “You know, it’s kind of funny: all these Republican candidates in the primary trying to beat Donald Trump, and I’m still the only person to beat Donald Trump.”

CNN picked up on the idea on Friday. “Biden has laid out the stakes of the election in as stark terms as any American election ever. But as serious as he is about what’s at stake for democracy in 2024, aides to the president’s reelection campaign tell CNN that the needling will keep up as they shift fully into general election mode – even if it prompts criticism that the president has let himself be dragged into Trump’s way of playing politics.”

This should give up hope.

For one thing, Biden is taking the high road and the low road at the same time. If American democracy really is on the line, and it is, then Biden is showing a willingness to do whatever it takes to defend it, even if that means getting down in the mud to face off with the chief mudslinger.

For another, and more importantly, this could end up being the most effective way of neutralizing the destructive power of the Big Lie. As I said Thursday, in repeating it, over and over, Trump is saying, subliminally, that “I know I can’t win, otherwise, I wouldn’t be explaining why I’m about to lose.” By calling Donald Trump a loser, and by doing that every day, Biden is taking what’s now subliminal and making it obvious to all.

I think it’s hard to overstate how crucial that is. The Big Lie asks people to believe that there are dark and mysterious forces at work in America that are so big and malicious and entrenched that the only way to get what you want is to throw out the practice of democracy and start anew. In this story, Trump is the champion of something huge and noble, and that can be appealing to people who have only a passing interest in politics.

In calling Trump a loser, however, the president is reducing the Big Lie’s “nobility” down to its base parts, as if to say: No, Trump isn’t fighting for justice. He isn’t fighting the “deep state.” He isn’t fighting for you. He’s a loser, and he’s doing what losers do – explaining, over and over, why he can’t win in the hopes of duping you into believing that he’s not a loser.

Left to its own devices, Trump’s Big Lie is an existential threat to the republic. The president, however, is putting that threat in its proper context so that people with only a passing interest in politics – which, let’s face it, includes most people – can see that there’s nothing heroic about it. Trump is a con man who’s doing what con men do. The Big Lie attempts to preempt democracy. Biden is preempting that preemption in the name of democracy. Best of all, his campaign understands that.

“It is Donald Trump who continues to deny the truth about the 2020 election,” campaign advisor TJ Ducklo told CNN. “Joe Biden is a winner. He won that one. Donald Trump is a loser. He lost that one. So us calling him a loser is simply a response to an issue that he continues to raise himself.”

This is more needling on Biden’s part. This is more than taunting. It’s neutralizing what is for Donald Trump his most powerful weapon. That alone is reason to hope, and for giving doomerism a pass for the day.