Joe Biden has figured out a way to pit GOP lawmakers against the MAGA extremists: columnist

In light of President Joe Biden's successful budget negotiations with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) the Washington Post's Greg Sargent suggested Democrats use his strategy to get Republicans to ignore their far-right colleagues and their threats that never come to fruition.

As Sargent noted, Biden in both his 2020 presidential campaign and in the recent budget dealings, was able to isolate the MAGA Republicans as outsiders as he dealt with McCarthy.

As he wrote on Sunday, "Biden is operating from a largely unappreciated theory of MAGA, and in some ways, it’s working," before explaining the budget deal came together " even though the deal’s spending cuts are not close to what Republicans sought. Yes, the outcome legitimizes the debt limit as a tool of extortion and imposes cruel new work requirements on many food stamp recipients. But Republicans didn’t use this showdown to crash or cripple the economy, as some observers (including me) worried they might."

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The key, he suggested, is that Biden has made a point of focusing on the differences between MAGA Republicans and conservative lawmakers who abhor their extremism.

"Bidenworld did believe that some MAGA Republicans were willing to default and force global economic cataclysm to harm the president’s reelection, a senior Biden adviser tells me, but also that many non-MAGA Republicans ultimately could be induced not to go that far," he explained. "This illuminates Bidenworld’s broader theory of the MAGA GOP: The way to defeat the MAGA threat to the country is to marginalize it within the GOP coalition — that is, to contain it."

As former Biden senior adviser Kate Bedingfield explained, "He has never hesitated to call out the extreme MAGA wing of the Republican Party. But he gives Republican voters and legislators who reject that wing of the party a place to go.”

To which Sargent added, "Biden also plainly believes that conducting the nation’s business on a bipartisan basis is inherently stabilizing. That sometimes requires treating the opposition — or a large swath of it — as a mostly conventional political party, which risks mitigating perceptions of the threat it poses."

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