Biden Can Beat Trump. This Is What He Needs to Do Right Now.

Now that he has conclusively won the New Hampshire primary, it looks far-fetched that Donald Trump’s one remaining rival, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, is going to swoop in and take the Republican presidential nomination from him. That means that Democrats need to move past their justifiable shock and incredulity that Trump may be president again and get real about crafting a strategy to beat him in November’s general election. If you believe the polls, Biden is not just losing but is in arguably the worst position of any incumbent seeking reelection in the modern era. To turn it around, the president and his campaign team must recapture the “resistance” zeitgeist of 2017, link Trump to the violent extremists in his coterie, lay out exactly what dangers he poses to the United States, and advance a coherent vision of what Democrats plan to do with their power if Biden is reelected.

For the two years following Trump’s election in 2016, Democrats were unified in an almost unprecedented fashion. Despite all the social media dunking on “the resistance,” the reality is that, for a time, even rank-and-file Democrats who rarely turn out for anything but elections were enlisted in a whole-party effort to thwart the Trump administration’s designs. The Trump administration did everything it could to boost this mobilization effort, with a seemingly never-ending string of outrages and policy assaults throughout 2017, including the so-called Muslim ban in January, the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the ham-fisted and doomed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump’s juvenile nuclear brinkmanship with Kim Jong-un, and more.

That fighting spirit and cross-coalition camaraderie will be hard but not impossible to recapture. To do so, potential defectors from Biden, as well as first-time voters for whom this is all ancient history, need not be bludgeoned with the past but rather asked to viscerally inhabit the consequences of a Trump victory. That also means facing a cold reality: Jan. 6 won’t cut it. The insurrection’s political utility for Democrats has been exhausted. While convictions of Trump in the Jack Smith–led trial could conceivably change some minds, no amount of rehashing the day’s events or Trump’s role in them is going to meaningfully move the political needle.

Biden’s speech on the anniversary of Jan. 6 was a good example of rhetoric that the president and his allies need to leave behind. It was mostly a greatest-hits album of things that Biden has hit Trump with a thousand times: about not just the insurrection, but calling fallen veterans “losers and suckers” and promising to suspend the Constitution. He talked about how Trump won’t accept the results of the 2024 election. And all of these things are true, but they are priced in. Is there anyone out there who thinks Trump will give a gracious concession speech on election night and call for unity like a normal person?

Voters need to hear less about Jan. 6 and more about how Trump plans to deform the government he hopes to once again lead. People need to be scared by new threats Trump guarantees and by ways that American lives will be made materially worse by a second Trump term. I’m thinking about something like a two-minute prime-time ad that narrates the second Trump administration from a year or two in the future. What is it that we think he will do with his first year in office?

If we believe the far right’s Project 2025, there are plenty of horrifying answers to choose from. The first is the broad-daylight scheme to use the Insurrection Act to put down any post-election protest and dissent across the United States and to deploy the U.S. military to the cities Trump routinely disparages as crime-ridden hellholes. Biden mentioned it briefly in his Jan. 6 address, but this authoritarian impulse needs to be front and center. The First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and protest will be erased. The Biden campaign also needs not just to highlight Trump’s worsening rhetoric about how he will “root out” people on the left who “live like vermin within the confines of our country” but to treat it like a promise—and convince Democrats that cherished rights are at stake.

And there’s one cherished, already decimated right that Biden must repeatedly tie inextricably to Trump: the right to abortion and contraception. As Jill Filipovic wrote in Slate this week, the president needs to make Trump’s reelection synonymous with the ongoing threat to destroy what remains of reproductive rights in the United States. Since Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices struck down Roe v. Wade, Republicans have simultaneously pursued a national abortion ban and used the federal government to crack down on the availability of abortion drugs, to harass and intimidate officials in states where abortion is still legal, and to make all forms of contraception more difficult to obtain and pay for. One needn’t reach too deep to imagine what this reproductive dystopia would look like; it’s already there in places like Texas and Florida. Liberal and moderate voters need to be convinced that it will come for them too. And since the Dobbs decision came down in the summer of 2022, Democrats have routed the GOP every time abortion has been directly at stake, in ballot initiatives and constitutional referendums and judicial races.

It’s not just the reproductive tyranny that Biden needs to tie to Trump but also the right’s attacks on vulnerable people and schools: the war against trans lives; the hysterical, book-banning onslaught against public educators; the desire to coldly look on (if not cheer) as migrants drown in rivers. Democrats crushed Republicans in school board elections across the country this past November when these culture war issues were front and center, and during his presidency, pushing back against cruelty to migrants was one of the most successful aspects of anti-Trump politics.

Indeed, the Biden campaign also needs to reset its portrayal of Donald Trump as a tyrant. It may seem hard to believe if you’re a left-wing political junkie, but Biden is not effectively painting Trump as an unhinged extremist. This can’t be about just democracy; those in the Biden campaign must make clear that Trump is a radical threat to everything. The way to do that is to connect the dots between Trump himself and the many unhinged extremists in his orbit. Rather than mock Trump for his memory lapses and verbal stumbles (a can of worms the Biden people really should not want to open), as they did over the weekend, they must zero in ruthlessly on Trump’s fringe ideas and dangerous friends.

There’s a playbook for this: The 2012 Obama campaign’s portrait of Mitt Romney was merciless, narrowly focused, and rolled out while the GOP primaries were ongoing. It might have been a caricature, but it drew on real elements of Romney’s biography that were out of step with where the electorate was. Twelve years ago, there was widespread public revulsion against the sort of swashbuckling finance-and-banking industry huckster who’d helped plunge the economy into the Great Recession with lies and risk. The Obama campaign deftly linked its opponent to vulture capitalism and drove the point home again and again.

There is still time for the Biden campaign to do the same. Anti-weirdo politics were highly effective in 2022 against people like radical Senate candidates Blake Masters, Herschel Walker, and Mehmet Oz, and the same blueprint can be followed against Donald Trump himself. The 45^th president has deeper and more enduring support than those imitators, but his ties to deeply unpopular ideas are even stronger than theirs.

On this front, it’s time for Biden to learn from his enemies. The far right is extremely adept at lifting potentially toxic concepts out of left-wing spaces, imbuing them with whatever twisted meaning it wants them to have, then tagging every Democrat in America with them. Operatives like Chris Rufo are not particularly subtle about it, often announcing in advance things like “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ ” Years of often quite successful anti-CRT mobilizing followed that tweet—and indeed, Rufo’s forces have proved to be masters of discourse manipulation, recently instigating a moral panic about diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, which most people had probably never even heard of six months ago.

Democrats need to get into this game as soon as possible.

Far-right intellectual spaces are crawling with reprehensible ideas and lunatic fringe figures that are practically begging to be mined for opposition research. There’s people like Trump sycophant and Fox News bloviation staple Charlie Kirk, whose campus organization, Turning Point USA, is a reliable fountain of outrages, indecency, and white supremacist hijinks. In December, Kirk called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” and “not a good person” and spent most of MLK Day attacking him. Kirk has also launched a campaign against the Civil Rights Act, which he has called “a huge mistake.” Why isn’t the Biden campaign hammering Trump with these chilling plans advanced by Trump’s allies?

The time to tag him with this kind of inflammatory rhetoric is now. Do it unapologetically. Run ads about his chummy dinner with Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes, who has frequently praised Adolf Hitler, attacked Jews, and said things on camera like “The enemies of Christ have no future in this world.” Run ads with Trump’s 2015 appearance on Infowars, the despicable program of provocateur and Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones, and highlight their ongoing relationship as well as Jones’ role in the insurrection. Lest you think this kind of thing is in the past for Trump, he still aligns himself publicly with far-right fringe figures like Laura Loomer, a self-described “proud Islamophobe” with whom he appeared on camera last summer and who recently cheered the deaths of migrants crossing the Rio Grande by tweeting, “Here’s to 2,000 more.”

It is a comprehensive failure of elite leadership in the Democratic Party that the names of these bottom-feeding goons are not widely known, nor is their deep association with Donald Trump. And if outside-looking-in types aren’t close enough to Trump’s inner circle for you, there’s always Stephen Miller, whose Austin Powers–villain aura and long history of cavorting with racists and anti-immigration extremists predated his destructive turn as one of Trump’s most influential advisers. Trump is reportedly considering Miller for attorney general.

Every utterance by every Democrat in the next nine months that mentions Trump should use the word extremist to describe him, and every opportunity should be seized to connect Trump to fringe figures with hateful and unpopular beliefs and histories.

Finally, while Biden needs a more effective negative campaign against Trump, he also needs a more positive one for himself and the issues his voters care most about. There’s more to politics than campaign websites, but there’s currently nothing on Biden’s reelection page about issues. If the campaign has circulated a second-term agenda, it is a well-kept secret. The Biden campaign needs to start telling the story of what it has done—not in white papers about each plank of the Inflation Reduction Act but in broad strokes that highlight what Democrats as a party and Biden as a person stand for. The perception among many rank-and-file Democrats is that the Biden administration is a spent force. That needs to change immediately.

The campaign also must address issues that continue to drag down Biden’s numbers, like high prices and inflation. Although those numbers are moving in the right direction, the damage is done, and Biden must use the bully pulpit to call for lower interest rates and attack those who have spent the past several years raking in record profits while inflicting the highest-profile misery on consumers, like grocery chains, auto manufacturers, and airlines.

Again, what is needed is not mind-numbing detail but a sense of where the administration’s values lie. Take the Middle East, for example, where the Biden administration’s ongoing embrace of the Israeli response to the Oct. 7 Hamas atrocities is clearly costing him with younger voters while achieving seemingly nothing among those with hawkish views on the conflict. Young folks don’t need to know exactly where the Biden administration wants to put the border between an Israeli and a Palestinian state as much as they need to feel that he wants the killing to stop. He could just use that phrase: “We’re going to stop the killing in Israel and Gaza.” And he needs policies and actions that show he means it. That kind of coalition management is badly needed after four years of the progressive left getting used like a punching bag whenever elite Democrats felt they were in trouble, from the “defund the police” pile-on to the new consensus, which has calcified seemingly overnight, that big-city sanctuary policies are somehow responsible for the influx of migrants into the United States and that Democrats need to basically fold like a pack of CVS playing cards on immigration to have any chance in November. On immigration, too, an alternative vision is needed as badly as the capacity to manage the migrants arriving in record numbers.

That’s also what 2017 was about. Early in the Trump presidency, the left and center left were alive with new ideas about health care, college costs, institutional reform, climate change, and more. That might have led many leading 2020 aspirants to veer too far left for moderates and independents during the primaries, but it also pushed Biden himself to be bolder in what he stood behind, both as a candidate and as president. The lesson of the past several years is not to just give up on innovative ideas forever and conclude that your own most committed voters and activists can be consigned to crazy-aunt status while you court suburban moms. Democrats swept the 2018 midterms on the back of that ambition. They need that kind of hopeful ferment back. Biden’s vision for a second term doesn’t need to be exclusively fan service for progressives, but it does, crucially, need to exist. If they don’t turn out for Biden, he will lose, and he needs to give them reason to do it beyond merely stopping Trump.

Nothing can change the fact that Biden is already the oldest person ever to serve as president, that he has lost a step, and that he will never be the kind of orator who fills arenas with starry-eyed devotees. And it is far too late for any kind of orderly process to replace him as the nominee. But unless something changes dramatically in the coming months, this is the Democrats’ guy, and these are the cards they’ve been dealt. Wallowing in disbelief about Trump’s lead in the polls, or assuming that voters will eventually see reason if Biden’s campaign keeps asking them nicely, is not going to cut it. They need a plan to win, and rank-and-file Democrats need to see it and to be made a part of it before it’s too late.