Opinion Criticizing a president is always okay — even one running against Trump

Perry Bacon Jr.

A “Vote Uncommitted” sign is seen on the ground at a rally in Hamtramck, Mich., on Sunday ahead of Tuesday's statewide primary. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post) 

“Democrats and others on the left need to stop slamming fellow liberals for criticizing President Biden. The argument that defending democracy means people should keep their concerns about the most powerful person in the country to themselves because it’s an election year is antithetical to robust public debate, free thought and other principles at the heart of democracy itself.

Thousands of Michigan Democrats are expected to vote “uncommitted” Tuesday in the party’s presidential primary, to show their opposition to Biden’s support of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

I assume Democrats strongly aligned with the president will attack the “uncommitted” voters for such a public rebuke of Biden, which they will say hurts the president and therefore automatically helps former president Donald Trump’s campaign. Some Biden backers are already making that argument. And the “you’re helping Trump” charge has been used against left-leaning writers who have said Democrats should reconsider putting up Biden as the party’s candidate and against liberal talk-show host Jon Stewart for suggesting the president’s age is a legitimate issue. (To his credit, Biden himself never makes these “shut up and fall in line” type of arguments.)

“If you’re not willing to just support the president now … you might as well just get your MAGA hat, because you now are helping Trump,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said during an interview on MSNBC last week.

Democrats pushing back against any criticism of Biden do have a strong argument: They say that everything possible must be done to prevent a second term of the radical, anti-democratic Trump — even discouraging legitimate criticism of the president. And it’s difficult to imagine it helps Biden electorally to have fellow Democrats saying he is old, unpopular, afraid of taking questions from the media and bungling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (We shouldn’t automatically assume these criticisms will hurt Biden in November. Barack Obama resoundingly won the 2008 election, despite his supporters’ claims that Hillary Clinton’s extended primary run against him that spring were severely damaging Obama’s general election prospects.)

Left-leaning critics of Biden are in a complicated position. Criticizing Biden nowcould result in Trump winning and turning the United States into an autocracy where, in the future, it would be much harder to slam a sitting president.

But even if Democratic criticism of Biden increases Trump’s chances of winning, I still support people airing their concerns. Biden critics are engaging in essential acts of democracy: showing up and protesting at a political leader’s events; slamming him in writing; voting against him in primaries to signal frustration. Democracy is what so many of us on the left claim we are fighting to defend from Trump. We shouldn’t be against democratic acts because they are electorally inconvenient.

If democratic actions must be paused anytime an election is nearby, to prevent the ascent of an autocratic leader, we are already living in something less than a full-fledged democracy.

Yes, you might say, because of the radicalism of today’s Republicans, America is a quasi-democracy and it’s essential for Biden to win to keep the “quasi” part. But in a democracy, the right way to win an election isn’t trying to suppress alternative views but instead convincing people that your side’s arguments are better.

In the case of the Democrats, either defending Biden’s Gaza policy on the merits (very hard) or pushing him to change course (easier) are much more democratic alternatives than telling critics they shouldn’t express their concerns publicly. Arguing that Biden is a capable president is a far superior course than suggesting people shouldn’t bring up his age.

I deeply fear a Trump victory. But part of democracy is that sometimes a terrible candidate wins. A bigger subversion of democracy would be if the tens of millions of people who are likely to vote for Biden this fall were browbeat into never publicly disagreeing with him before the election. “To protect democracy, people should not criticize the sitting president, the most powerful person in the country,” is a ridiculous and highly contradictory argument. Democrats like Fetterman should stop making it.“