Republicans are taking advantage of unrest on campuses from New York to California by attacking Joe Biden for his failure to quell protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and portraying America as being out of control under the US president’s leadership control comes.
The unrest has heightened tensions within Biden’s Democratic Party over his handling of the Middle East conflict and drawn some attention from the trial of Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee for the November election, on charges of falsifying documents in the Middle East distracted New York “hush money” case.
“[Democrats] “We tried to make a big deal out of these Trump trials, but they took a backseat to the protests,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former congressional aide.
As dramatic scenes unfolded this week in which police raided an occupied building at Columbia University in New York and counter-protesters attacked a pro-Palestinian camp at the University of California, Los Angeles, Trump was campaigning during a court hearing break in Wisconsin.
He called on college presidents to “immediately remove the camps, defeat the radicals and reclaim our campuses for all ordinary students who want a safe place to learn.”
Trump also praised the actions of law enforcement in New York: “The police came and everything was over in exactly two hours.” It was beautiful to see.”
On Fox News on Wednesday, a conservative news host said the images of colleges were like those in a “third world country” as right-wing commentators criticized Democratic politicians over the protests. “You have the former president of the United States on trial and these thugs causing incredible chaos,” said a guest on the show, Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas.
The White House has sought to distance itself from the most aggressive protesters, denouncing “dangerous hate speech” expressed by some and declaring that all demonstrations should be “peaceful and lawful.”
Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, said the president will give a speech on anti-Semitism on Capitol Hill next week and will be briefed “regularly” on the protests.
“A small percentage of students. . . “It should not be possible to disrupt or disrupt the academic experience,” Jean-Pierre said on Wednesday.
But Republicans have used the unrest to portray Biden as weak and unwilling to confront his own left-wing critics or make more forceful public comments on the issue.
“When will the president himself, not his mouthpieces, condemn these hateful little Gazas?” Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, told reporters on Wednesday.
“President Biden must denounce Hamas campus sympathizers without making ambiguous statements about the Israelis fighting a just war of survival,” Cotton added.
Feehery said the problem for Biden was that no one was “paying attention to him” and protesters weren’t “afraid” of him: “He should be supporting law and order.” He’s like the parent trying to silence the children by giving them more candy.”
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson rushed to Columbia University last week to make a clear political statement against the protesters. The trip came shortly after the House passed a bill including aid to Ukraine that was controversial within his own party and has sparked a challenge to his leadership.
“There are few better foils for Republicans than super-left campus protesters,” said Kyle Kondik, an analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “It fits their larger narrative of the election, which is that Trump is going to come and clean up the mess.”
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a bill that expands the definition of anti-Semitism to enforce anti-discrimination laws. The majority of both parties supported him. However, 70 Democrats and 21 Republicans opposed it.
The political fallout has been compared to the anti-Vietnam War protests that provided a damaging backdrop to the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and helped pave the way for Republican Richard Nixon’s victory over Hubert Humphrey in the race for the White House later that year year to pave.
With less than four months to go before the convention, Biden is walking a very fine line between condemning protests, which are unacceptable, and avoiding the young progressive voters he needs to turn out.
The College Democrats of America, a student organization affiliated with the Democratic National Committee, said this week it was supporting Biden for reelection, but added that students by and large “have the moral clarity to see this war for what it is.” it is: destructive, genocidal, and unjust.”
They criticized Republicans for “denigrating all protesters as hateful” and also Biden’s “bearhug” strategy toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, it is not certain that Republican attacks on Biden will continue. Their previous attempts to portray Biden and the Democrats as weak on law and order during the 2020 White House race and 2022 midterm elections were not particularly effective because other issues ended up being more important – with the exception of some congressional races.
In addition, Democrats accused Republicans of hypocrisy, pointing out that many of them defended the attacks on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. They also noted Trump’s remark that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
Kondik said that although the college protests are a “more comfortable” topic for Republicans, his outlook for a close election has not changed. According to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, Trump has a 0.8 percent lead over Biden.
Like Biden, Democrats struggled in tight races in November to find a position that limits the political fallout. “There is a fine but very important line between protected speech and speech that threatens violence or seeks to intimidate,” Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat running for Senate, said Wednesday.