CNN
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President Joe Biden is visiting Europe, warning of the evils of totalitarianism and the dangers to democracy, while presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump returns home, seeking favor with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, plotting revenge and considering undermining the U.S. election.
The former president is laying out the argument of his 2024 presidential opponent: that the West faces unprecedented threats to the rule of law from hostile forces both within and without.
But Trump’s strength also suggests that the centerpiece of Biden’s visit, a speech on Friday in Normandy paying tribute to one of former President Ronald Reagan’s greatest speeches, may not reach many ears in the U.S. With every speech and public remark, the former president shows that the temptations of demagoguery, the demonization of outsiders and the rhetoric of extremism are as powerful now as they were before World War II.
The 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings that led to the liberation of Europe has become a rallying point for Western leaders who warn that the darkest forces of political extremism are awakening. In meetings and speeches, they have also drawn parallels between Putin’s brutal attack on Ukraine and Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg.
It’s nothing new for a modern US president to visit Europe, touting their shared history of triumphing over tyranny, but never before has a commander in chief done so after his predecessor tried to subvert democracy to stay in power. The possibility that Biden will lose reelection and the risk of a repeat of the chaos that Trump wreaked on European allies cast an ominous shadow over the trip.
Biden will send an unmistakable message on Friday by drawing on the legacy of Reagan, one of the greatest Republican presidents, and suggesting that his rival has an affront to American and Republican values. In 1984, the 40th president denounced American isolationism on the cliffs known as Pointe du Hoc, where U.S. Army Rangers stormed on June 6, 1944. He also invokes the war against Nazism to call the West into a new, and ultimately successful, Cold War struggle against another form of extremism: Kremlin-style Communism. Biden will suggest that Trump is convening the same forces that sparked a world war with his “America First” foreign policy, by attacking the integrity of the free and fair 2020 elections and using extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric reminiscent of the Nazis.
Biden, who will almost certainly be the last U.S. president born during World War II, is calling on Americans to commit themselves to the same democratic values as The Greatest Generation, whose last representatives are now passing away. “Let’s remember those who fought here, who died here, who literally saved the world here, and let’s be worthy of their sacrifice,” Biden said Thursday, surrounded by the graves of more than 9,000 Americans. “Let’s be the generation that, 10, 20, 30, 50, 80 years from now, when history is written about our generation, it’s going to be said, ‘When our moment came, we rose to the occasion. We rose to the occasion. We rose to the occasion. Our alliance is stronger. And we saved our democracy, too.'”
That a president has to make such a claim shows how much the political climate has changed since Reagan stood in this same place 40 years ago and told veterans, “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. They are the men who scaled the cliffs. They are the champions who helped liberate a continent. They are the heroes who helped win the war,” bringing tears to many eyes.
At the time, the Republican Party was an internationalist, pro-democracy party. It had proudly boasted that Reagan had won the Cold War, but Trump had mixed isolationism with populism, favoring Putin over America’s allies. This decisive change in outlook may make Biden’s speech an effective piece of political theater, but it may have limited political appeal. The White House and Biden campaign probably don’t think that bringing up the Zipper mentality will shake Trump’s support among the Republican base.
But the president is trying to win over disaffected national security Republicans nostalgic for the days when a hawkish foreign policy was considered one of the pillars of legendary conservative policy, and in particular to attract some of the tens of thousands of Republicans who voted for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the party’s primary elections, long after she suspended her campaign. The Trump ambassador to the United Nations may have endorsed his former boss and criticized Biden for his weakness on the international stage, but she is far more sympathetic to the current president’s international vision and disdain for dictators than she is to Trump’s strong-arm appeasement.
Biden’s European trip coincides with the campaign return of his predecessor, who was convicted of felony crimes in a hush-money trial in New York last week. Trump used the opportunity to make new confessions to Putin, a war crimes suspect who knelt before him during his presidency. The Republican front-runner also claimed he could free jailed American journalists.
“Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter being held by Russia, will be released shortly after the election,” Trump said in a video posted to Truth Social on Tuesday, “but he will certainly be home and safe before I take office. Russian President Vladimir Putin will do that for me… but he won’t do that for anyone else.”
This is not the first time that Trump has tried to demonstrate his special influence over Putin: In fact, at a press conference in Helsinki, Trump said that on the issue of Kremlin interference in the election, he trusted the Russian leader standing next to him, rather than the US intelligence agencies he leads.
Trump’s politicization of the Gershkovich case is notable because it comes after months of quiet efforts by the U.S. government to secure the release of the journalist and former Marine Paul Whelan. It raises the possibility that Russia might manipulate the negotiations, thinking that Trump might offer better terms or that the Biden administration might be willing to pay a higher price before the election. If the Kremlin ultimately releases the journalist to Trump, it would be a major success for him and put him in a debt to Moscow.
Trump’s outreach to Putin comes at a time when the Russian president has been ostracized by the international community for his brutality against Ukrainian civilians and poses the greatest threat to continental European unity since the war that prompted Biden’s commemorative flight across the Atlantic. Exploiting the plight of Americans under Russia’s ruthless penal system to score political points is also one of the most cynical strategies of modern campaigns. Russia on Thursday dismissed Trump’s comments, saying Gershkovich’s release would only come as a result of reciprocity.
After President Trump went easy on Putin, the incumbent president went out of his way to criticize the Russian leader. Despite the Soviet Union’s decisive role in defeating Nazism, Putin was not invited to the Normandy landings event. “He’s not a decent human being. He’s a dictator, and he’s struggling to hold his country together while he continues this attack,” Biden said in an interview with ABC News. Instead, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attended.
Meanwhile, Trump’s first campaign rally as a felon on Thursday showed why the election could be so close. Speaking to a crowd of his handpicked supporters at a Turning Point Action town hall, he delivered an effective, incendiary appeal to Republican voters. He repeated lies about fraud in the last election and claimed he intended to win votes “too big to rig” in November’s election. After his jury conviction, he baselessly claimed the verdict was “rigged” and attacked the justice system.
And in the border state of Arizona, he unleashed a barrage of scathing anti-immigrant rhetoric, much of it hyperbolic and false about the crisis at the border, that may serve as an effective counterweight to Biden’s attempt this week to reduce his own exposure on the issue by drastically cutting asylum applications. The former president has consistently refused to commit to accepting the results of the November election, and this week he also threatened a new attack on the rule of law, suggesting he would use executive power to prosecute political opponents.
“Vengeance certainly takes time. And, let’s be honest, sometimes revenge is justified,” Trump said in an interview on “Dr. Phil Primetime” that aired Thursday. “You know, sometimes it’s justified.”
At a town hall meeting on Thursday, the former president was surprised that many of the questions from the friendly but enthusiastic audience were about the high cost of living, Arizonans’ struggles to buy groceries and the perception that the unchecked flow of illegal immigrants to the border makes it unsafe.
Put simply, this may be the deciding formula in the election: Trump will use the economy and immigration to counter warnings that his rival Biden’s anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies make him unfit to run for president again.
