Republicans Unironically Claim Joe Biden’s Agenda Is Tearing the Country Apart

The GOP, an increasingly extremist party whose members still can’t all admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, has a message for Joe Biden: Stop being so radical and divisive. That was the gist of Senator Tim Scott’s rebuttal to the president’s first address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night. Painting Biden’s calls for unity as “empty platitudes,” the South Carolina Republican accused Democrats of dividing Americans in pursuit of a far-left agenda, and of abandoning GOP lawmakers who sincerely want to come together to advance common-sense legislation. “We need policies and progress that bring us closer together,” Scott said. “But three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.”

As a thesis, it was fundamentally dishonest. But it was also telling: Lacking a serious and coherent agenda of their own, and under the spell of a wannabe-strongman, Republicans’ response to Biden is to misrepresent him as they open up new fronts in the culture wars. Sure, at times on Wednesday night Biden seemed moments away from breaking into “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”—but, Republicans want Americans to believe, that’s just a front for a fringe agenda that has, in the words of Scott, helped push the nation “off its shared foundation.”