Are we about to see Joe Biden go on the attack against the Republicans?

Flashes of comedy in an appearance by the president at the White House Correspondents’ dinner may point to a broader strategy, writes Chris Stevenson

Joe Biden speaks during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington (Reuters)

After a six-year absence, a president was back speaking at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner over the weekend – with Joe Biden keen to show his comedy chops.

That gap was thanks to Covid-19 – leading to a two-year hiatus – and to Donald Trump’s shunning of the event during his term in office. Given that, the current occupant of the White House was at pains to talk up the need to maintain a free press and to defend the values of democracy.

As for Trump, he was an easy target. “We had a horrible plague, followed by two years of Covid,” was Biden’s quip – accompanied by a reference to Trump’s repeated false claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him. “Just imagine if my predecessor came to this dinner this year... now that would really have been a real coup if that occurred.”

Biden can also do something his predecessor was completely incapable of doing: he can laugh at himself. “I’m really excited to be here tonight,” the president told the assorted journalists, “with the only group of Americans with a lower approval rating than I have.”

That approval-rating gag is important, with the midterms starting to creep up and the White House struggling to lift Biden’s numbers significantly (barring a boost at the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) – plus the Democrats at large struggling to push through any more of their legislative agenda.

At the dinner on Saturday, Biden acknowledged the difficulty he’s had in making headway: “I came to office with an ambitious agenda, and I expected it to face stiff opposition in the Senate. I just hoped it would be from Republicans.”

So the choice now is whether to go on the offensive against the Republicans. There were a couple of flashes of this during the Correspondents’ dinner, as Biden took a dig at the party across the aisle with a reference to recordings of the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, discussing his worries in the wake of events around the Capitol on 6 January 2021: “There’s nothing I can say about the GOP that Kevin McCarthy hasn’t already put on tape.”

In private conversations, Biden is said to have lamented that people are no longer focusing on what he considers to have been the poor state the country was in under Trump, according to CNN. The president knows he will get much of the blame from the electorate for the state of the economy – but the White House is working to the old line, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”

So we may see a more forthright Biden, even if there are concerns about how this could affect any remaining chance of bipartisan legislative work. The White House Correspondents’ dinner may have been the first step.