'A New Approach'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

81% : Joe Biden, like Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, appears to have recognized that and did what little he could to improve that mood by showing Trump some goodwill.
62% : Trump won the popular vote this time.
52% : Or it could be that this is nothing more or less than a desperate bid for relevance, the latest of many examples of anti-Trumpbroadcasters realizing belatedly that the country doesn't share their antipathy to him and choosing to join Team MAGA in order to grow their following.
46% : As others have noted, the language the two used to describe their visit with Trump was striking in how it mirrored diplomatic rhetoric.
46% : Trump 2.0 will be one long hostage negotiation in that same vein: When there's no other way to stop a dangerous man from doing immense damage, your best play is to get him on the phone and try to talk him into doing the right thing voluntarily, before anyone gets hurt.
46% : That was roughly the way liberals, classical and otherwise, viewed Trump and his movement until November 5.
43% : Sure, Trump was the newly elected president at the time, but his Democratic opponent had received more votes and he faced an array of popular and institutional obstacles to imposing his will on government.
43% : And the Supreme Court, having weakened the law's ability to deter Trump earlier this year, might well do so again if he challenges its authority.
43% : That makes Trump an opponent, fully normalized, and due all the courtesies to which opponents are normally entitled.
40% : Trump is no longer an enemy attacking the system from within; the system itself has been remade to incorporate his vision of government, per the verdict of American voters on November 5.
38% : Diplomacy between Trump and anti-Trumpers under those circumstances was more akin to a meeting of equals to avert war.
36% : Trump is freakishly susceptible to flattery, particularly when it involves former critics crawling to him and asking to be friends.
36% : I'm not opposed to Joe Rogan's theory that Biden held a photo op with Trump purely to spite Democrats after they prevailed upon him to quit the race in July.
30% : Many others will follow that approach as Trump goes about consolidating power and turns the federal government into a system of patronage for his friends and harassment for his enemies.
30% : I think that also explains Joe Biden's decision to invite Trump to the White House last week.
28% : Every attempt to deter Trump has failed: checks and balances, criminal indictments, impeachments, credible warnings about creeping fascism, desperate appeals to the better angels of our nature-all hand-waved away by the American voter.
25% : Hostile to American ideals, immoral and authoritarian by design, and sufficiently disliked that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and never once enjoyed a positive approval rating in his first term: MAGA's weak legitimacy fueled the sense that it was an enemy of American ideals and the sense that it was an enemy fueled perceptions of its illegitimacy.
24% : The fact that Biden offered Trump one anyway last week, extending to an enemy of liberalism a courtesy previously reserved for partisan opponents, felt like an official surrender on behalf of the left to postliberalism for having successfully changed the rules that govern the country.
20% : On Twitter this morning, one person sneered at Morning Joe's reunion with the president-elect as supposed proof that "Democrats never actually thought Trump was Hitler or a fascist dictator," but that's wrong.
18% : All the John Kellys and James Mattises have been purged, after all, replaced by yes-men no more moral or civically minded than Trump himself.
5% : And while the relationship between Trump on the one hand and hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on the other has always been ... complicated, the two have been harsh critics of Trump for most of the last eight years.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.