U.S. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden exit Marine One as they arrive on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, U.S. January 2, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
Four years this week, after losing a free and fair election, Donald Trump attempted a paramilitary takeover of the United States government. It was a capital crime against democracy. Yesterday, the man who defeated him invited reporters to the White House on the eve of the anniversary to urge Americans to always remember.
In effect, however, Joe Biden encouraged us to forget.
Trump is a criminal president-elect. He will compound the number of crimes committed during his first term with more crimes during his second. Biden knows this. His party knows this. Everyone knows this.
Yet Biden plans to invite Trump to the Oval Office on January 20 (the second time since November) and to attend Trump’s inauguration. It will be as if nothing unusual is going on; as if all the talk of democracy’s doom was just that; as if January 6, 2021, were just another cold day.
His words say never forget.
His actions say it’s OK to.
Biden isn’t all wrong. In a democracy, the outgoing president should not stand in the way of the incoming president. Trump did that to him. Biden won’t do that to Trump. The “peaceful transfer of power” means forfeiture in accordance with the will of a higher power, namely the people. In this, Biden already made his point about democratic norms.
But he doesn’t have to keep making it. That’s the problem here. He’s made his point, but he keeps keeping on, as if his reputation for being a good president depends on it. However, nowhere is it written that a sitting president must invite a president-elect to the White House (twice). No federal statute requires him to attend the other’s inauguration. Nothing compels Biden to be courteous to Trump.
Biden is choosing to.
It’s a bad choice.
As I said, Biden shouldn’t obstruct, in accordance with democratic norms, but all else is courtesy. Courtesies may be normal, in that we expect them, but they are not democratic norms, in that democracy can’t function without them. To the contrary, Trump never invited Biden over. He refused to attend his inauguration. Democracy lived on.
In an op-ed for the Post, published Sunday night, Joe Biden echoed statements made at the White House last night. In it, he said that four years ago, “democracy was put to the test – and prevailed.” “We should be proud that our democracy withstood this assault,” he said. “And we should be glad we will not see such a shameful attack again this year.”
But by extending courtesies to Trump that he is under no obligation to extend, Biden is making Trump’s second election, and the triumph of criminality that it represents, seem normal – just more of the same.
“I think what [Trump did on J6] was a genuine threat to democracy,” Biden told reporters Sunday, “and I’m hopeful that we’re beyond it.”
We’re not beyond it.
The election was a continuation of it.
“The insurrectionists failed in the moment, but they set off a series of events that transformed US constitutional democracy by upending the core principle that no man is above the law," Nicholas Grossman wrote.
The criminals will soon be in charge.
And Biden is playing along.
Without naming Trump, Biden said in the op-ed that there was an “an unrelenting effort … to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand. This is not what happened.”
True, but by telling us that democracy prevailed in its test against the J6 insurrection, and by treating the man who tested it as a normal politician (only a year after accusing him of being the “destroyer of American democracy”), Biden isn’t really encouraging us to remember. His real message is the crisis is over – everything is back to normal. So even as Biden urges us to remember J6, he’s enabling its erasure.
Biden could make different choices to encourage us never to forget and to inspire patriots who are preparing for the troubles ahead.
For instance, he could withdraw his invitation to Trump. He could boycott his inauguration. He could exhort his party to join him. He could urge former presidents to stand against Trump’s agenda of corruption. He could spark discussion of the futility of Trump taking the oath. (Trump didn’t mean the first time. He won’t mean this time.) In general, Biden could make clear things are not as they should be.
The criminals will soon be in charge.
Biden would risk allegations of hypocrisy, as if he didn’t mean what he said about defending democratic norms. But these are not norms, as I said. These are courtesies. Anyway, there’s no democratic norm that’s worth defending if defending it abets a criminal against democracy.
Some would say Joe Biden shouldn’t do any of this, because what’s the point? His own party might turn on him. The press corps might, too. The Republicans and their media would flay him. And Trump, as president, might use such discourtesies as a rationale for revenge.
I think these concerns are beside the point.
The point is remembering a capital crime against democracy.
We will forget if evil seems normal.
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