Biden Promised to ‘Turn the Page’ on Trump. What Went Wrong?

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Biden Promised to ‘Turn the Page’ on Trump. What Went Wrong?

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, looks back on the hopes and realities of Bidenism.

As the second Trump era dawns and the Biden era dims, it’s worth asking: What was Bidenism?

One answer to that begins in 2016, when Donald Trump won his first presidential election. That win was a rupture for many Democrats. To them, Trump didn’t win so much as they lost. How disillusioned did voters need to be with Democratic governance to consider someone like Donald Trump?

Jake Sullivan was Hillary Clinton’s senior policy adviser in the 2016 campaign. That loss was a rupture for him. And he was one of the Democrats who, after that campaign, embarked on a very public effort to get the Democratic Party to admit it was doing something wrong — and it had to change.

One of Sullivan’s main conclusions was that the Democratic foreign policy had become severed from domestic politics in a way that left both vulnerable. For too long, Democrats had understood their domestic policies as serving the middle class and their foreign policies as being part of a free-trade-centric, liberal world order that America led.

But the task now was to build a foreign policy that the American middle class saw as serving their interests. Because if you didn’t, they would turn to strongmen like Donald Trump. You had to win democracy here at home before you could ever protect it abroad.