President Joe Biden this week invited Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to visit the White House. What an embarrassing reversal from the president’s, and his political allies’, original reaction to her election.
Liberal media described her September victory as an “earthquake” and made sure to note her party’s “roots in the neo-fascist movement.”
Three days after the Italian election, Biden worried about what her win said about the state of democracy in the world, telling reporters, “I’ve met with Xi Jinping over 78 hours, 68 of which are in person, over the last 10 years. And he makes the case straight up that democracies can’t be sustained in the 21st century. You just saw what’s happened in Italy in that election.”
What was Biden’s point in dropping the Communist leader’s comment? That he thinks the dictator of China is right about Western democracy being a failure?
And a number of anonymous Biden aides told the press they’re “worried” about Meloni. Politico’s headline blared “White House anxiously watches Meloni’s rise to power.”
Where’s the anxiety now? No longer politically convenient?
That’s the problem with Joe Biden. Everything with him is us vs. them until he suddenly needs the “them.” His demagoguery and irrational comments get swept under the rug by a compliant media, but he has done more to harm national — and international — unity than previous presidents.
A lot of politicians run on uniting people — but that was Joe Biden’s entire message during his presidential campaign. Vote for me, not that awful Donald Trump who divides people and calls them names. But as president, Biden has presided over one of the more divisive administrations in recent memory. His signature comment is that anyone not voting the way he wants is threatening democracy. If you’re not with him, you’re against him.
A few days before November’s midterm elections, Biden gave an angry speech urging people to vote for Democrats to “preserve democracy.” And that wasn’t even as bad as his really rageful September speech: Standing in front of a creepy red backdrop at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, Biden, who’d previously called his political opponents “semi-fascist,” said, “MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
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It’s not enough for Biden to say you shouldn’t vote for his political opponents; he has to add that they are targeting the “very foundations” of our country!
This rhetoric is irresponsible — and also simply untrue. Once the election was over, Biden stopped angrily screaming about the death of democracy and moved on to pretending Republicans are running around pushing the elderly off cliffs.
And now that he needs Meloni to offer an assist in Ukraine, he’d like us to forget he once trashed her so brazenly. Biden needs Italy and the rest of Europe to step up on Ukraine or he will have an increasingly difficult sell to Americans on why it matters to us but not them.
There’s also the small detail that Meloni, like the domestic political enemies Biden maligns, is no fascist. She has governed like a moderate, something Biden hasn’t managed. An Atlantic piece this month pointed out that Meloni’s party is “to the left of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in its support for a welfare state.” She also may personally oppose abortion but has no intention of ending it in Italy. Some radical.
She just visited Ukraine and supports it — even staring down her coalition partners and Italian public opinion to do so.
It’s hard to say no to the president of the United States, so Prime Minister Meloni will likely visit the White House. But it would be great if she could mention to the president that calling his political opponents “fascists” isn’t actually OK and frequently pretending democracy is about to come to a halt only plays into the hands of our geopolitical adversaries.
The president and his irresponsible language should be reined in. Maybe it will take Italy’s “woman, mother, Christian” to do it.
Karol Markowicz is co-author of the forthcoming “Stolen Youth.”
