Biden’s Long Game with Trump – Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus was the Roman general who was made the dictator of the Roman Republic and charged with stopping Hannibal’s bloody invasion during the Second Punic War, which saw Carthaginian forces rage across the bucolic Roman countryside. The Roman military leader calculated that his Carthaginian foes, as invaders separated from their homeland, could not last as long as the Romans could. Roman forces would attrite the Carthaginians, using time as a valuable ally in their war against Hannibal’s invasion.
This tactic of attritional warfare, of limiting direct Roman military engagement with Hannibal’s forces to effectively drain and bleed the Carthaginians in the field. Thus, the Fabian Strategy of avoiding open battles in favor of more contained engagements was born. The Fabian Strategy appears to be President Joe Biden’s preferred method for fighting former President Donald J. Trump as the two elderly men holler at each other from the rafters of America’s slowly dying republic.
Biden’s Fabian Strategy Takes Shape Against Trump
The forty-sixth president wants to paint Trump as totally unhinged. Should Biden opt to run for reelection, the Biden team wants to be able to paint their candidate in 2024 as the stable, safe choice who rolls up his wrinkled sleeves and gets things done. And if Trump were to go into full meltdown mode, as he did at the end of the 2020 Presidential Election Cycle, Biden’s team assumes that the president will benefit from Trump’s rage machine by turning off fence-sitting moderates in the General Election.
Essentially, if Biden were to run again, he intends to run a slightly more active version of the “basement strategy” that he used to great effect against Trump in 2020. Trump is the incandescent man to Biden’s man who isn’t there. The thing about being a perpetual rage machine, as Trump tends to be, is that if there is no foil against which to pit oneself, then the entire schtick loses its appeal.
Rather than having a great villain to duel, as Trump did with Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump ends up fighting himself or fighting the faceless men who populate the Administrative State (a.k.a. the “Deep State”). This appeals to Trump’s loyal base. But the base is not enough to get Trump over the finish line. And the crazed raging against himself—with Biden ducking out for cover at every turn rather than feeding the rage monster—will only reinforce the popular narrative that Trump is a chaos candidate who will destabilize an already unstable system.
Enough voters in a General Election will likely militate against Trump rather than for Biden…just as they did with Biden in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
All the meanwhile, Biden will use the ensuing days of rage that will come from the ongoing ordeal of former President Trump’s trial in the midst of what will surely be an utterly divisive campaign to continue refining his party’s line against Trump and the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement.
Biden is At War with A Large Number of Americans
Regardless of what Biden says (or refuses to say) about Trump’s indictment and ongoing legal issues in public, no matter how impartial Biden pretends to be in public on the whole sordid affair, make no mistake that the trial of Trump continues to be an assault against any American who dared to even look favorably upon Donald Trump.
The Trump indictment, whether he is guilty of the misdemeanor or not, is a weapon being unfairly wielded by Democratic Party insiders to stymie Trump’s growing campaign.
Biden doesn’t have to say anything at all. His minions from inside the Administrative State prosecuting Trump as well as the mainstream media have already made their stance perfectly clear. Trump and his MAGA movement will not be given a fair shake. No one on the Left is interested in having a legitimate airing of grievances with an equitable, gentlemanly conclusion to the whole ordeal.
This is about preserving their power on the Left while ensuring that the Right never has a legitimate shot at power for another generation.
The Left will impugn and undermine a sizable portion of the country’s voting population as well as an entire movement; a movement they have referred to at various times as “deplorable,” “irredeemable,” “dregs,” and “domestic terrorists.” Biden himself has labeled his presidential predecessor as representing “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
There is ample evidence to suggest that the Biden Administration is turning the powerful anti-terrorism tools that the national security state developed to fight al Qaeda against American MAGA-types, who have been labeled as “domestic terrorists” and “White Supremacists.”
Just so we’re clear, according to a Grinnell College and Selzer & Company poll found that “fewer than half of Republicans (42%) describe themselves as ‘MAGA Republicans,’ and that group is noticeably older than other Republican voters. A majority of MAGA supporters (55%) are age 55 or older, as compared to 37% of non-MAGA Republicans, and an even larger majority are male, almost 60%. MAGA followers are highly likely not to have college degrees (a super-majority of 76%) as compared to 61% of other Republicans.”
This is not the archetype of a grizzled, calculating, and nefarious terrorist. These are middle-aged-to-elderly men who are unhappy with the direction of the country. They’re just ordinary voters. So, the way that this group is being demonized by the American Left should be worrying everyone who is not either employed by the Democratic Party or a Far-Left ideologue. Biden is feeding into the narrative that the MAGA-type Republican is somehow alien to any previous incarnation of the GOP to sap whatever momentum Trump may have going into the General Election.
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The image of Trump as a divider and agent of chaos has been ingrained into the American psyche by the Democrats, the media, and Pop Culture. But Trump does a disservice to himself by often lashing out and appearing unhinged—especially when he is up against Biden, who uses the Fabian Strategy to great effect against Trump. If Trump is, in fact, the GOP nominee and Biden does run for president again, Trump will face the same struggles in 2024 that he did in 2020.
Is the chance at winning the presidency under these terrible conditions even worth it for Trump who could probably have a nice post-presidency life if he just ceded the moment to a younger generation?
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
