The president repeats his attacks on Joe Biden during a news conference in Japan. : THE BIG IDEA: The old saw that partisan politics should stop “at the water’s edge” has never sounded so quaint. It is yet another example of a civic norm that eroded over decades only to be discarded entirely during the Trump era. By both sides. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.) inserted the term into the lexicon in 1947 as he converted from isolationist to internationalist.