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Joe Biden
OpinionComment
Dave Kauffman
Dave Kauffman

Opinion | The US needs another ‘great communicator’ to heal the political divide – and neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump are that person

  • Between Trump’s bully-boy style and Biden’s inability to communicate with half of America, the country is more polarised than ever
  • The US needs both a message and messenger that everyone can believe in. Biden must take the time to understand why America is hurting

Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
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US President Joe Biden delivers remarks on ending the war in Afghanistan, in the State Dining Room at the White House on August 31, 2021. Photo: TNS
Dave Kauffman

I make no apology for the fact that I voted for Donald Trump in the last US presidential election. I believe that the policies he implemented granted Americans the freedom that the country was built on. At the same time, I’m under no illusions about him; his bombastic leadership and communication style have only ripped the American social fabric further apart.

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However, I believe President Joe Biden is worse. The lack of accountability he displayed after the blundering withdrawal from Afghanistan shows, in my view, that he is unfit to lead the nation. Beyond that, Biden only seems capable of communicating to existing supporters and alienating the rest of us.

In the run-up to the election, he compared Trump with the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; the insinuations behind this are reprehensible to anyone who voted for Trump.

If Biden wants his message of unity to be more than a cliché, he must learn to communicate with the entire nation. Vilifying half of them is no way to do that.

America’s division is more than just a feeling. A study co-authored by Brown University’s Jesse Shapiro has found that political polarisation among Americans has grown rapidly in the past 40 years, and has certainly grown faster than in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany.

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This polarisation has teeth. While right-wing militias have been on a steady rise since the 1990s, leftists are increasingly taking up arms in response. Are we really surprised that US hate crimes are at their highest level in over a decade?

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