By Noah Rothman
Friday, June 07, 2024
If you’re convinced of the virtues of your candidate
for the White House and the evils of the other guy — confident enough in your
capacity to judge character and your candidate’s capacity to navigate the
political landscape over the next four years — this isn’t the piece for you.
This is a piece for the “double haters.”
There aren’t many of us. Only about 16 to 20 percent of
the potential electorate, depending on the poll, expresses negative views
toward both parties’ presumptive presidential nominees. But in recent
presidential elections, we’ve punched above our weight. In 2016, roughly
one-fifth of the electorate was composed of “double haters,” and they broke for
Trump. They were a far smaller percentage of the electorate in 2020 at just 3
percent, a factor that is likely attributable to Joe Biden’s high favorability
rating at the time. And today — much like 2016 — both candidates are once again
viewed negatively by a healthy portion of the electorate, and for good reason.
Put aside for the moment the candidates’
characterological defects and their personal peccadillos. The double-hater demo
has every reason to expect that whoever wins the 2024 race will preside over a
disastrous term in office, but those respective disasters will have distinct
contours.
If past is prologue, Joe Biden will continue to oversee
the steady erosion of America’s strategic position overseas. “Joe Biden will be
a foreign-policy president,” the late former governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, predicted shortly after the 2020 election.
He was right, as were those of us who took stock of Biden’s judgment in
relation to foreign affairs and forecast four ruinous years ahead.
During his term, Biden has engineered a national
humiliation for the United States in Afghanistan and the revivification of
Islamist terrorist groups bent on exporting violence to Europe and North America. He signaled his unwillingness to confront the Kremlin
right up until the moment when Vladimir Putin made good on his irredentist
rhetoric. U.S. military officials have spent the last three years telling
anyone willing to listen that China is making concrete preparations for an attack
on Taiwan. Those warnings have led the president to commit the United States to Taiwan’s defense, but
initiatives designed to prepare the U.S. military for such a terrible
eventuality have only come in fits and starts. And the inconstancy in Biden’s
approach to supporting America’s embattled partners abroad, from Ukraine to
Taiwan to Israel, has emboldened Western civilization’s adversaries.
A second Biden term would see the continuation of these
trends and, very likely, a host of new horrors as the world’s bad actors
concluded that they had a narrow, four-year window to secure their interests at
America’s expense.
Although Democrats have done their utmost to undermine
confidence in their commitment to the conventions that ensure comity in
government, and we can be sure the party would seek to weaken the conventions that diffuse power and thwart rank majoritarianism, the party’s elected officials
have shown less ability (if not willingness) to undermine the fundamental precepts
of the Constitution. The same cannot be said for Donald Trump and those within
the GOP who mimic his imperious affect.
“The president has learned his lesson to count on people
he would trust,” said one Trump adviser when asked about the type of person
with whom Trump would surround himself in his second term. Trump’s image-makers
insist the former president is allergic to “yes-men,” but his record in and out
of office suggests that “loyalty” is the foremost quality he seeks in his
underlings. In the years since he left office, he has sent as many signals as
he can — signals which aspirants for positions of power in his orbit received loud and clear — that the quality he seeks in his
people is their willingness to retroactively justify the actions he took that
catalyzed the January 6 riots.
The former president has no desire to be constrained by
executive-branch appointees or career civil servants. Those who tried to talk him out of his worst instincts or criticized his conduct leading up to Inauguration Day in
2020 long ago fell out of his favor. Nor does there appear to be much tension
within the Republican Party over the amount of license its elected officials
are prepared to extend to Trump. The GOP’s voters have largely remade the party
in Trump’s image, and those voters are allergic to criticisms of the former president. All the
political incentives run counter to the impulse to inhibit Trump or check his
influence with legislation.
The Trump who took office in 2017 — a political neophyte
who outsourced the role of the executive to conventionally conservative
Republican mainstays who understood how to wield the levers of power — is long
gone. The former president knows how government works now, and he is surrounded
by ambitious figures who seem more than comfortable with the MAGA movement’s fatalism and retributive impulses.
Nor would we have to wait around for the crisis to
emerge. Trump’s legal woes ensure that the crisis would be upon us on Day One.
One of his first exercises would be either to pardon himself of the federal
crimes of which he is accused, or to seek the dismissal of pending charges at
the state and federal level citing, most likely, the extent to which they
interfere with the president’s Article II responsibilities. While those who
promulgate the notion that a Trumpian despotism is inevitable are indulging in
overwrought rhetoric and disregarding the legal and political impediments to
such an outcome, the unprecedented conduct in which Trump would almost
certainly engage at the outset of his second term would be sufficiently
destabilizing. Trump’s actions would have a reciprocally radicalizing effect on
his already thoroughly radicalized opponents, contributing to civil unrest and
acts of “resistance” from activist judges, politicians, and street-level
agitators alike that would only hasten our national descent into nihilism.
There’s no safeguarding against any of this. Even if the
political will in either party existed to prevent or even forestall it, which
it does not, there would be few mechanisms available to members of Congress to
do so. Joe Biden will not be compelled by Congress to preserve U.S. interests
against the malign intentions of foreign actors. The president’s authority when
it comes to international affairs is deliberately broad. Congress can restrain the president on
the margins or compel him to act in ways the legislature favors when there is
broad consensus, but they cannot compel him to abandon the risk-aversion that
has so emboldened America’s enemies.
Nor will Trump be bound by an adversarial legislature or
the tools at its disposal to paint the president into a corner. “The machinery
of Washington has a range of defenses: leaks to a free press, whistle-blower
protections, the oversight of inspectors general,” read a recent TIME magazine dive into the prospect of a
second Trump term. Hardly anything that would put the fear of God into either
Trump or Biden. Neither man will have to face the voters again after November,
and neither will welcome dissent or even willfulness in his appointees. Each
will pursue his prerogatives with reckless disregard for their consequences,
foreseen and unforeseen alike.
So that’s what we have to look forward to: a cascading
series of foreign crises, domestic crises, or both simultaneously. The “double
haters” are justified in their unwillingness to contribute to any of these
undesirable outcomes.
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