Joe Biden’s Cult of No Personality

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, October 15, 2020

 

Donald Trump’s campaign has always been about Donald Trump: Trump is Trump is Trump is Trump, and he’s all Trump all the time, Trumpier and more Trump-focused by the minute. Even if this or that policy position “evolves,” even when he changes his mind on abortion and gun control, Trump’s basic political promise is always the same and always will be the same: that, as president, Donald Trump is going to be Donald Trump, bigly. For Trump, Trump is the only real issue, the only metric, the only criterion.

 

Joe Biden has decided to run exactly the same campaign: one in which the only issue that matters is Trump.

 

The Trump movement often is de­scribed as a “personality cult,” which it is, in no small part. The ritualized public adoration characteristic of the personality cult is, in Trump’s case, best personified by Mike Pence and his uxorial Trump puffery, a truly awful and creepy thing to witness, as is the Trump partisans’ bizarre homoerotic fan art that puts Trump’s face atop a bodybuilder’s physique. Strange stuff.

 

But the Trump phenomenon is not the first personality cult in American presidential politics. As with his casinos and game show, Trump’s main innovation on the personality-cult front has been to make the pageant bigger, dumber, and more vulgar. But Barack Obama’s personality cult was at least as ghastly as Trump’s, being less monarchical and more religious in character: Remember those celebrities ecstatically singing Obama’s name like Hare Krishnas. Bill Clinton once inspired genuine love and public adoration in his partisans — and, though the memory is faint, so did Mrs. Clinton, once. Teddy Roosevelt still has a little bit of a personality cult more than a century after his death.

 

For many Americans — too many — presidents are not mere elected administrators charged with the oversight of one of the three branches of the federal government, but democratic god-kings personifying the nation and embodying its ideals and aspirations. That is why fights over the presidency are rarely really fights about taxes or health-care regulation or other policy questions, but instead are intense localized skirmishes in the larger American culture war. In 2008, we were asked: Are we to be the America of John McCain, or the America represented by Barack Obama? And we chose Obama. (De gustibus, etc.) In 2016, Americans were given a choice between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donald Trump (the political equivalent of a choice between bowel cancer and brain cancer), and a majority of Americans in a majority of the states chose Trump, giving him the Electoral College win even as Mrs. Clinton edged him out a little in the aggregate vote, 48.2 percent to 46.1 percent. Trump’s excess of personality (or his personality of excess), the fact that his victory was largely unexpected, and the fact that he won fewer total votes ensured that his term in office would be bitterly contested, and that the focus of Demo­cratic ire would be not Trump’s policies but Trump himself, his character and his personality.

 

Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president and a deacon (by no means the high priest) in his personality cult, has run a campaign that is first and foremost about Donald Trump, and only secondarily and distantly about Joe Biden. Biden saw that the best-performing Trump opponent in the polls was “Generic Democrat,” and he has done his utmost to be exactly that. Here, Biden’s aspirations were aided greatly by two factors: One is that his personality is mostly bland and pallid, and noisome where it is not boring; the second is the coronavirus epidemic, which gave Biden the opportunity to run the kind of campaign that best suits him, lounging at home and minimizing his spontaneous interactions with the press and public while Donald Trump, lagging in the polls, went ape. It is foolish to credit conspiracy theories, including the recent ones that Trump either faked his coronavirus infection or intentionally acquired the disease as a sympathy play, but if there had been another way for him to maximize the drama of his reality-show campaign, he surely would have discovered it. Unlike that of the most recent Democratic president, Joe Biden’s name does not rhyme with “no drama” (or with “plagiarist” or “liar” or “hair-sniffing weirdo,” for that matter), but “no drama” is what his campaign has been going for. Trump is providing enough drama for both campaigns.

 

This works to the great advantage of the plain-vanilla Biden. What does Biden have to offer in the personality department? That he likes to wear aviator sunglasses? That he likes choo-choo trains? The gentleman from Delaware is the Dela­ware of presidential candidates.

 

And where Biden is not vanilla-flavored, he is garbage-flavored. His personal life contains episodes of genuine heartbreak — the death of his first wife and daughter in a car crash, the cancer death of his son Beau, the addiction and travails of his son Hunter — but Biden has managed to render these sterile. He is a compulsively dishonest man, which led him to lie — publicly and repeatedly — about the circumstances in which his wife and daughter died, smearing the other party in the accident as a drunk driver when he was no such thing and when the police report found that his wife probably was responsible for the accident. The business dealings of Hunter Biden stink on ice, and Biden has been remarkably successful in stonewalling inquiries about them. Hunter Biden, a longtime addict, was kicked out of the Navy after failing a drug test. This has limited how much Biden wants to talk about his family and lean on that part of his life’s story to construct his political narrative.

 

But without that, what is Biden left with? He has been in public office or running for president for almost 50 years. Politics is all he is. But politics for what? A month shy of his 78th birthday, Biden still has not found an answer to that question. Biden in some ways resembles Lyndon Johnson, another cynical calculator doomed to be forever overshadowed by the messianic president he served as vice president; but even Johnson, for all his perversion and monstrosity, was at his core a creature of conviction, a New Dealer who believed that the role of the government was to give the little guy a hand up in the interest of fairness. John­son came into the vice presidency with a legislative record that was, if not unblemished, unquestionably substantial.

 

Nobody ever called Joe Biden “the master of the Senate.”

 

Instead, Biden’s hallmark legislative achievement is something he does not want to talk about now (the 1994 crime bill sometimes blamed for high incarceration rates among African Americans), and his most important job as vice president was helping to shape and administer the stimulus program that, among other things, created the very tax incentives that allowed Donald Trump to pay so little in federal income taxes for years. Donald Trump may, as the New York Times suggests, have been the single biggest beneficiary of those “carry back” tax provisions in the entire country. Which is to say, Biden’s three big moves in his 47 years in office have been: helping to lock up a lot of people he wants to vote for him, enriching Donald Trump, and — here is the one that matters — spending eight years in the soft spotlight of the vice presidency without embarrassing Barack Obama very much.

 

In 2020, Biden’s mission has been to not embarrass Biden very much.

 

So far, so good. Biden here benefits from the sycophancy of an American press that has become both open and practically prone in its subservience to the Democratic Party and its political aspirations. The Washington Post and the New York Times have dismissed many of the claims about Hunter Biden’s business dealings as “unproven,” which some of them are, but the press has exhibited very little curiosity about them. The New York Times can manage to get its hands on Trump’s confidential tax documents, but the corporate dealings of Rosemont Seneca Thornton (the partnership through which, Trump alleges, Biden received a payoff from Russian interests) remain mysterious and largely unexamined. Biden’s lies about the death of his first wife and daughter and his serial plagiarism are hardly blips in the media coverage. Even the sort of lurid thing that normally gets the press’s attention — Jill Biden’s ex-husband’s claim that they were divorced because she was having an affair with Joe Biden — have sunk beneath the surface with barely a ripple outside of the pages of the New York Post.

 

The choice in 2016 was Trump or Mrs. Clinton. The choice in 2020 is Trump or Not-Trump. That is the campaign Joe Biden wanted to run and, apparently, the campaign Trump wanted to run, too.