Voting for the Opposite of What You Want

By John O’Sullivan

Wednesday, July 03, 2024

 

We’re all familiar with the nightmare in which some terrible threat is chasing us but our legs, encased in heavy lead boots, move only very slowly onward as our pursuer gains on us. This election is the opposite of that nightmare: We seem to be moving toward a terrible threat — namely, the election of a Labour government with a majority of about 200 seats over all other parties — but our legs refuse to obey our commands to turn around, and we march relentlessly on to the gates that bear the ominous sign: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.

 

Sure, there is a large unexploded nuclear bomb of an issue lying in full view of the voters, there between the campaign trenches (as we shall see later), but because it doesn’t fit neatly into the conventional partisan division of issues — indeed it divides the parties internally — it’s not discussed as an election issue or at all. We are thinking of almost anything else but that. And the politicians assist our forgetting with a series of distractions.

 

The biggest such distraction in recent days has been the scandal of Betgate. (At the moment, Wikipedia’s list of scandals honored with the suffix “-gate” is just a few short of 500.) Betgate began on the 12th of June when the Guardian reported that a £100 bet had been placed on the likely date of the election, several days before Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had announced it, by a Tory MP in a Welsh constituency. Nor was the miscreant, Craig Williams, merely an MP. He was the parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister, a job that is a mixture of personal aide, bag carrier, the PM’s proxy for dealing with constituency matters when he’s too busy with national affairs, and all in all a humble but necessary first step in any political career — in other words an insider with access to the information that made the bet a sure thing. Williams apologized for placing the bet — “a huge error of judgment” — but suffered no immediate penalty.

 

After that the scandal speeded up. On the 14th of June, the Gambling Commission, which had opened an investigation into suspicious election bets, contacted the Metropolitan Police about a bet placed by a police officer from the elite Royalty and Specialist Protection Command. On the 17th, the officer was arrested and charged with “misconduct in public office.” On the 19th, the Tory Party’s director of campaigning, Tony Lee, was reported as being investigated for having placed a bet on the election date. So too was his wife, Laura Sanders, who not coincidentally was also a Tory candidate in a Bristol constituency. On the 22nd of June, the Sunday Times alleged that the party’s chief data officer, Nick Mason, had placed “dozens of bets” over “an unspecified period of time” that the paper estimated would have delivered serious winnings. Other leaks suggest that there may be many more people under investigation in both the Tory Party and the Met. But the scandal seemed to be losing steam. Its most recent villain-victim was a Conservative front-bencher in the Welsh Assembly very far removed from Downing Street. Also — good-journalism alert — scandals tend to generate such rumors automatically and for the moment should be treated skeptically.

 

That said, Harold Wilson’s old adage, “A week is a long time in politics,” is vindicated yet again.

 

Betgate has ensured that the Tory campaign — which was already becalmed off Normandy — will not be reviving any time soon. It pushed all other stories, some of which might have helped the Tories, off the front pages. It suggested that people at the very top of the Tory Party are frivolous, corrupt, self-serving, borderline criminal, and extremely stupid. Many voters already had such an impression because of “Partygate” — the earlier scandal of Downing Street get-togethers that violated the onerous Covid social regulations that the partygoers had imposed on the rest of the country. That helped to bring down Boris Johnson and dissolved what little trust remained between ministers and activists. Now, just when Sunak might hope the curse of Boris had faded, here it was happening all over again. And what possessed Craig Williams to maximize his chances of being “caught” by placing the bet in his own constituency — the one place in Britain where a humble paid public servant would be recognizable as someone with access to insider information on the election date. In the dying days of the Tory government, the thought naturally occurs: He wanted to be caught — it’s a cry for help.

 

A bigger mystery, however, is why Sunak waited until the 25th of June to suspend Craig Williams and Laura Sanders as Tory candidates. It can’t have been that Tory voters would have no one to vote for in those two seats, since the two candidates were doomed electorally anyway. His stated reason was that he wanted to know the results of the Gambling Commission’s investigation before firing people. That’s a legalistic response to a political crisis. Losing a Tory candidacy is not the same as a penalty like a fine or a prison sentence — many Tory candidates would love to be relieved of that very burden in present circumstances. And not firing those who have either admitted error or been plausibly accused of wrongdoing suggests that the prime minister had something to hide.

 

No one believes that Sunak himself placed a guilty bet; he’s wealthy enough to turn up his nose at a sure thing. Two explanations of this reluctance to strike do, however, suggest themselves. The first is that he had no real idea of how many other senior Tories might be implicated in Betgate. Until he found out, he couldn’t issue a sweeping proclamation of executions. Even though his chances of retaining a parliamentary majority are nonexistent, he couldn’t risk ensuring an outright catastrophe by adding candidates he had dismissed to the several hundreds likely to be dismissed by the voters. And that at least seems a prudent calculation.

 

The second is that Sunak didn’t initially realize that closing down the scandal as soon as it emerged by a simple decree that all involved in it would be sent into exile was a brutal political necessity. Why not? Because he isn’t very good at politics — which, alas, is the opinion of almost all his colleagues.

 

Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, must have been watching this Tory implosion with his fingers crossed in case a Labour gambler was exposed on the news. But when a Labour candidate in eastern England, Kevin Craig, was found to have placed a bet against himself, it seemed too comic a twist to hurt the party, especially when yet another Tory, Philip Davies, had raised him and placed a massive $10,000 on his own defeat. Mystified as to why? No dishonesty was involved, it seems; both men simply wanted to compensate for the disappointment of their political ambitions. Alas for Kevin Craig, he was immediately suspended by a neurotically risk-averse Labour campaign so that, sadly, his bookie may be able to deem the bet lost before the election is even held.

 

Labour is therefore cruising nervously to a landslide by avoiding controversy as much as possible and stressing what it will not do rather than what it promises to do. None of the other parties have made much of a dent in this well-armored defensiveness. Labour’s most effective critic so far has been the writer J. K. Rowling, creator of Harry Potter and a sharp critic of gender ideology, who has forced Starmer into contortions of embarrassment over the party’s failure to defend women-only spaces without evasive qualifications. She’s removing the camouflage over one of Labour’s most important internal disputes — its parliamentary majority will strongly favor transgender activists over its feminist critics — and she has science, law, and the recent drift of public opinion on her side. She even has the leading Tory women, notably “Equalities Minister” Kemi Badenoch, singing along with her from almost the same songbook. All of these advantages (including Rowling’s formidable gifts as a public spokesman), however, are more likely to provide a prelude to the first battles of the new Labour administration than a decisive factor on this election day. From the standpoint of Labour’s critics, this is a powerful issue, but it comes either too soon or too late when ten other issues are jostling with it for public attention.

 

That helps explain why the Tories have been trying out the innovative technique of appealing to the voters to please not give their opponent too large a majority. It’s a technique born of desperation, to be sure, but it’s more realistic than either a defense of the Tory record or the promotion of policies that no one thinks will matter the day after July 4. Given that support for Labour is rooted more in inevitability than in enthusiasm, this tactic may succeed in reducing the Labour vote by promoting apathy as an alternative to casting a vote you may regret. But it also gives lukewarm and disaffected Tories permission to vote Reform since a large Labour majority is already baked in the cake. Moreover, a confession of defeat is still humiliating even if it’s necessary — which it is when even rare good news for the Tories comes equipped with a curse. Thus, the Office of National Statistics has just announced revised figures showing that the U.K. economy was expanding faster than estimated in the first part of this year — and faster than any other G-7 economy. And the curse? Commenting on these statistics, Paul Dale, chief U.K. economist at Capital Economics, remarked, “Whoever is Prime Minister this time next week may benefit from the economic recovery being a bit stronger.” But that also looks like evidence that the present prime minister has called the election too soon to benefit from what appears to be a rising economic recovery.

 

To give the Tories some small credit, they have shown real signs of fight in these last desperate days. Sunak was judged a feisty winner in his second debate with a ponderous Starmer, and almost the entire party hierarchy came out swinging at Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party, after he diverged from the U.K. all-party consensus on Ukraine.

 

As the BBC summarized the controversy:

 

Farage said he had been arguing since the 1990s that “the ever eastward expansion” of the NATO military alliance and the EU was giving President Putin “a reason to [give to] his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again and to go to war.”

 

He added: “We provoked this war. Of course, it’s [President Putin’s] fault.”

 

Applying realist logic to this dispute, we can see that the Tories in their desperation have identified the worst possible threat to their interests, which is not Starmer’s Labour but Farage’s Reform. The former may threaten Britain’s prosperity and national character; the latter threatens the viability of the Tory Party as a party of government. If Reform were to take enough votes from it to push the overall number of Tory MPs to below, say, 80 while winning 20 seats of its own, that would start a realignment on the right that would end only God knows where. And though they lack allies on every other front, the Tories can rely on all other parties and almost all the media to join in attacks on Farage. Cabinet minister after minister duly launched denunciations of him as several varieties of a “Putin stooge,” and these attacks received support from commentators, newspapers, current-affairs programs, and social media across the political spectrum.

 

There were obvious weaknesses in this combined attack. Farage had warned in 2014 that continued NATO expansion would invite a Russian response, and when Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine came in 2022, he had condemned it as “reprehensible.” If that counts as pro-Russian propaganda by a Putin stooge — and I write this as someone who has been and remains a strong supporter of both NATO expansion and Western support for Ukraine’s resistance — then we risk making impossible, even criminalizing, any rational debate about Ukraine policy. We have already gone quite far down that rocky road when we treat reasonable questions about Western policy — Are we embarking on another “forever war”? What outcome short of Ukraine’s regaining its full territory, including Crimea, do we envisage? — as some variant of “disinformation” intended to subvert democracy. That’s not sensible since we have persuasive answers to such anxieties. Besides, any sustainable argument about Ukraine policy has to take into account the success or failure of Ukraine on the battlefield and of NATO and the EU in other arenas. That’s unpredictable, and if there is a breakthrough for anyone, we’ll deal with it when it happens.

 

But as the recent French and European elections have both shown, European public opinion is not quite so monolithic on these questions as before, though public policy remains so. Even in Britain, the European country with the strongest pro-Ukraine public opinion, there was pushback against the anti-Farage barrage. When Boris Johnson denounced his argument that the West had provoked Russia, Farage produced a Daily Mail front page from 2016 suggesting that Boris had said much the same thing. A former U.K. ambassador to Russia wrote to the Times saying that Farage was more or less right. And Farage was defended in similar terms by Michael Portillo, who occupies a unique position in English life as a former Thatcherite secretary of defense whose 1997 defeat in a bid for a seat in Parliament was wildly celebrated by anti-conservative opinion but who has gone on to become a much-loved public figure on all sides by reinventing himself as the host of a television program in which he journeys around the U.K. and Europe on railways. With this peculiar kind of anti-political authority, Portillo said he didn’t see any sign that Farage was defending Putin. And that benediction probably gave nervous Tories permission to defect to Reform.

 

Thus encouraged, Farage continued to defend what he had said on Russia and Ukraine (and other controversial comments) in speeches and interviews. He is now a practiced debater and performed with polished effectiveness. Even so, his choice to respond may have been an error not because his defense was weak but because it shifted public attention from other issues on which he and Reform enjoyed support without the drawbacks of controversy.

 

Certainly that’s what seasoned political observers think. It’s an opinion neither confirmed nor denied by the UK Polling Report’s analysis of the last 104 opinion polls from June 7 to June 29. This shows support varying widely for all parties in the last three weeks as follows: Labour’s support varies from a 34 to a 43 percent share of the national vote, Tory support from 11 to 25 percent, and Reform from 8 to 24 percent. In the last few days that has settled down to something like — by my back-of-the-envelope calculation — Labour 40 percent, Tories 20 percent, and Reform 17 percent in national vote shares. There are other minority parties, of course, notably the Liberal Democrats, who will do well at Tory expense, but UK Polling Report guesstimates that these figures will translate into the following distribution of parliamentary seats: Labour 377, Conservative 189, Liberal Democrats 37, Scottish National Party 24, and Greens 1.

 

As the Report realizes, however, this guesstimate is likely to be seriously distorted by such factors as local historical voting patterns, by tactical anti-Tory voting between Labour and Liberal Democrat voters, by Muslim voters abandoning their usual Labour loyalty for sectarian Muslim parties over the issue of Gaza, by tactical Tory voting, and by the unknown number of “shy Reformers” (many of whom were previously “shy Tories”) who don’t admit to their voting preferences because they fear “official” disapproval — not without justification, incidentally. Conservatives are likely to lose — and Liberal Democrats and Reform likely to gain — from these combined distortions. All in all, on Thursday night, the British electorate will be giving the electoral kaleidoscope a terrific shaking-up with unpredictable consequences — if only in terms of parliamentary representation.

 

In terms of stable policies, however, the election will represent an extraordinary continuity. As many commentators have observed in recent years, British politics is in the middle of a vast realignment in which political parties change their class composition with middle-class elites moving left and blue- and white-collar workers going in the opposite direction. ( I discuss this in a recent Claremont Review article on Matthew Goodwin’s book Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics.) This analysis is not confined to the Right but spreading across the spectrum. In a recent New Statesman article, John Gray, once a regular National Review contributor and now an independent-minded post-liberal thinker whom many Brits regard as another Orwell, defined the election as one in which the fundamental choice at issue — namely, national democracy versus global technocracy — wasn’t really being discussed at all.

 

Indeed, Gray was understating his case. That choice is not a topic of debate because all the parties except for Reform are on the side of global technocracy without ever saying so explicitly. The Tories have been split on this choice since the Brexit referendum, and the return of David Cameron symbolizes the party’s decision to remain ambivalent on it for the time being. They are facing oblivion in deference to that unadmitted orthodoxy on issues like net zero and migration. But all the other parties that might serve in government – Labour, Lib-Dems, Scot-Nats, the Greens — are more completely submissive to the same set of orthodoxies. Voters will throw out the Tories, as Peter Hitchens points out, in order to get more and worse of the same.

 

It is not hard to predict a bad result from that “change.” As Gray, who understands that our new masters are not how they present themselves, points out:

 

Rule by technocrats means bypassing politics by outsourcing key decisions to professional bodies that claim expert knowledge. Their superior sapience is often ideology clothed in pseudo-science they picked up at university a generation ago, and their recommendations a radical political programme disguised as pragmatic policymaking. Technocracy represents itself as delivering what everyone wants, but at bottom it is the imposition of values much of the population does not share. A backlash was inevitable.

 

And a backlash will be inevitable under Labour in due course. But they will stick with the policies much longer because they really believe in the orthodoxies — including the delusion that they are experts. They would benefit greatly if they were to seek advice from the sadder but wiser Grays and Portillos who have been there before and know how this movie turns out. Alas, they won’t.

Axios Bungles the ‘Imperial Presidency’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, July 02, 2024

 

Axios has published a report this morning titled, “Behind the Curtain: The imperial presidency in waiting,” in which it proposes that, if he is reelected, Donald Trump “promises an unabashedly imperial presidency.” And I’m sorry to record that it’s . . . well, it’s almost entirely garbage.

 

I truly write that more in sorrow than in anger. We really do need to limit the power of the presidency, and, if it takes fear of Donald Trump to do it, I’m all in. Certainly, that fear is not imagined. Like Barack Obama before him, and Joe Biden after him, Trump was guilty of attempting to usurp Congress’s lawmaking powers, and, as I have written and said 359,701 times by now, he should have been impeached in January 2021 for interfering with Congress. But, as quickly becomes clear, Axios does not actually understand the problem that it believes itself to be warning about, and, as a result, those warnings fall flat.

 

The term “imperial presidency” was coined by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and it signifies two things: (1) the enormous growth of the president’s war powers over time, and (2) the president’s intrusion into areas that are supposed to be managed by Congress. Schlesinger was horribly biased as an analyst, and prior to his anti-imperial phase, he was one of the country’s most vocal champions of the presidency, but the phenomenon he described was real — and, if anything, it has got worse since he published his book in 1973. Unfortunately, though, what Axios includes as supposed examples of Schlesinger’s theory are not, in fact, examples of Schlesinger’s theory.

 

Instead, most of what Axios complains about are either core presidential powers that might be used in ways of which it disapproves, or powers that have been granted to the president by Congress that it would prefer he didn’t use. And when it does hit upon an actual problem, it mixes it in with the inoffensive and thereby muddies its case. I suspect that this is because Axios does not want to acknowledge that the real issue we face — the usurpation of Congress’s lawmaking power by successive presidents — puts both Barack Obama and Joe Biden in an extremely unflattering light, too, but, whatever the cause, it’s a missed opportunity.

 

Let’s take those complaints one by one.

 

1. A re-elected Trump would quickly set up vast camps and deport millions of people in the U.S. illegally. He could invoke the Insurrection Act and use troops to lock down the southern border.

 

This is not “imperial.” One might dislike it as policy, but it’s not “imperial” because Congress has indisputably granted the executive branch the authority — actually, the instruction — to detain and deport illegal immigrants. Bill Clinton deported illegal immigrants. George W. Bush deported illegal immigrants. Barack Obama deported illegal immigrants — and bragged about it. Joe Biden has deported illegal immigrants, albeit not enough. The question with Trump is thus not of the power to deport, but of the scale of its use. If, in a second term, Trump were to deport “millions” of illegal immigrants, he would not be encroaching on congressional law, but enforcing it.

 

The same is true of invoking the Insurrection Act, which, as its name suggests, is an “act” of Congress. Certainly, there are circumstances in which such an invocation would be ultra vires. But it’s not per se “imperial” to use it — or, at least, it’s not more imperial than it was when President Hayes used it to deal with railroad strikes, President Franklin Roosevelt used it to suppress riots, President Eisenhower used it to enforce desegregation, President George H. W. Bush used it during both Hurricane Hugo and the Los Angeles riots, etc. As a matter of fact, there is a close historical analog to what Axios suggests. In May 1882, President Chester Arthur invoked the Insurrection Act to deal with gangs that were causing chaos in the Arizona territory. Were, say, the governor of Texas to request assistance with the influx at the southern border, it is hard to see how it would be “imperial” for the federal government to acquiesce.

 

2. In Washington, Trump would move to fire potentially tens of thousands of civil servants using a controversial interpretation of law and procedure. He’d replace many of them with pre-vetted loyalists.

 

This is not “imperial” either, because it involves the executive branch running the executive branch. Per Article II, “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” This means that the president is in control of the executive branch from top to bottom, and, indeed, that he has to be in control of the executive branch from top to bottom, because, if he’s not, then the executive branch exists independently of our democracy. This is not some kooky theory. It is how the United States worked until at least the Civil War, and it used to have a name: the “spoils system.” As I wrote last time this was raised:

 

I remain astonished that this is controversial, or that it ever became so. If the president cannot fire everyone in the executive branch — and fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason whatsoever — then he is not in control of the executive branch, is he? Coppins suggests that to allow the president to control who works for him is to render “the people in these roles political appointees.” And? They are political appointees. Providing that it is consistent with the will of the democratically ratified Constitution and of the other democratic branch (Congress), all the staff that work in the executive branch are there to execute the will of the guy who was elected. There may be good practical reasons for our presidents to wish to retain a good chunk of the civil service between administrations, and there are certainly solid historical explanations for why we developed a civil service whose low-level, non-policy jobs aren’t doled out as rewards for partisans each time the executive branch changes hands. But that is a wholly discrete matter from whether those presidents are obliged to keep any employees on, which they are not, and which, within the logic of our constitutional framework, they cannot be. A civil service that exists independently of the elected leader of the executive branch is not a part of the executive branch, but separate from it. It is a fourth branch of government. Or, to use a term I don’t particularly like, it is a “deep state.”

 

Next, Axios suggests:

 

3. He’d centralize power over the Justice Department, historically an independent check on presidential power. He plans to nominate a trusted loyalist for attorney general, and has threatened to target and even imprison critics. He could demand the federal cases against him cease immediately.

 

Here Axios casually combines normal and legal behavior about which nobody should be worried with insane and illegal behavior about which everyone should be worried.

 

Most of this fits into the first category. The “Justice Department” cannot be “an independent check on presidential power,” because, if it were, we would have an unelected fourth branch of government exercising power that had been allocated nowhere in the Constitution. There is nothing wrong with the president choosing a “trusted loyalist” to work for him — providing, of course, that the Senate is happy with the choice. (How, I wonder, should we describe Merrick Garland?) And, while it would look bad, Trump obviously has the power to “demand the federal cases against him cease immediately,” because those cases are being executed under his name.

 

By contrast, “target and even imprison critics” is so far beyond the proper role of the presidency that it isn’t imperial so much as it’s tyrannical. The remedy should that happen is — and ought to be — impeachment. Really, the whole piece should have been about this problem, and it should have included an acknowledgement that President Biden, too, has tried to imprison his own cultural enemies, including a bunch of pro-life protesters and the Texas Children’s Hospital whistleblower.

 

4. Many of the Jan. 6 convicts could be pardoned — a promise Trump has made at campaign rallies, where he hails them as patriots, not criminals. Investigations of the Bidens would begin.

 

This isn’t “imperial,” either. Not only does the presidency exclusively enjoy the Constitution’s pardon power, but that pardon power cannot be reviewed or interfered with by the other branches. I do not think that the January 6 convicts should be pardoned. But that does not change the fact that pardoning them would be entirely within the president’s authority.

 

As for “investigating the Bidens”? That would depend on the investigation. The Biden administration has investigated — and charged! — Donald Trump. Is that “imperial”? Axios doesn’t mention this, but Congress is already investigating the Bidens. If Trump were to launch a frivolous investigation into Joe Biden and his family, that would, indeed, be a problem. But the problem wouldn’t be that the move was “imperial” — the power to investigate exists in Article II — but that he was abusing that power for political purposes. That distinction matters.

 

5. Trump says he’d slap 10% tariffs on most imported goods, igniting a possible trade war and risking short-term inflation. He argues this would give him leverage to create better trade terms to benefit consumers.

 

That is an insane policy proposal, but, unfortunately, the laws that Trump would use to achieve it were passed by Congress, have never been struck down in the courts, and have been used by a host of other presidents in recent history. There is an argument to be made that tariffs are the sole preserve of the legislature, and that it thus violates the spirit of our constitutional order for the president to be making such sweeping changes to their rates. But that’s an argument that can be made by people like me, who want to limit (or end) Congress’s delegations of power. It is not an argument that can be made by people who have defended every presidential overreach of the last 30 years. Frankly, it represents the height of partisan bias to complain that President A might use tariff powers that he’s unequivocally been granted while staying silent while Presidents B and C claim sweeping powers that they have never been given at all. In the last three years, President Biden has tried to steal a whole host of lawmaking powers — often while knowing full well that there was no legal rationale beneath his bluster. Inter alia, he’s tried to rewrite federal gun-control statutes, to impose a national eviction moratorium, to demand a vaccine mandate, to “forgive” hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans, and to alter the anti-pollution laws, and, when he did all this, Axios shrugged. It is absurd — yes, absurd — for it to now complain about the use of delegated tariff powers that have been used by every president we’ve had during the last 50 years.

 

6. Conversation would intensify about when Justices Clarence Thomas, 76, and Sam Alito, 74, would retire.

 

Nominating Supreme Court justices is a core presidential power. Unless Trump intends to bypass the Senate confirmation process, I have no idea why this is in here.

 

If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am. I’ve lived in America for 13 years now, and I’ve spent that entire time complaining about executive overreach. This has not been a partisan exercise: I complained about it when Obama was president, I complained about it when Trump was president, and I am complaining about it now that Biden is president. If Trump is president again, I will complain about it then, too. Throughout this period, I’ve observed that the press only seems to care about this topic when a Republican is president, with the effect that the general public now thinks that only Republican presidents step out of their box. And now Axios comes along, and not only limits its criticisms to the guy who might be president in the future — not the guy who currently is — but completely mischaracterizes the problem! Aaarrrgghhh.

Trump Shouldn’t Repeat the Kamala Harris Mistake

National Review Online

Wednesday, July 03, 2024

 

We hope that Donald Trump and his party are watching what is happening now with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and drawing the right lessons about choosing a running mate. The seriousness and consequences of that decision are now on full display.

 

The 81-year-old Biden’s age-related decline, which was laid bare before the world in Thursday’s debate, has provoked a series of crises. It is a political crisis for Biden, his campaign, and his party. It is a national-security crisis for a country whose commander in chief is plainly not up to the full-time job of the presidency, especially outside the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays. And it threatens to become a constitutional crisis if Harris and Biden’s cabinet need to contemplate invoking the 25th Amendment over Biden’s objections.

 

At every turn, the presence of Harris in the second-highest office exacerbates the crises. Biden’s party could coalesce around a movement to pressure him to step aside — but Harris is so unpopular and so plainly unsuited to the presidency that Democrats blanch at putting their fate in her hands. Voters could more easily accept a caretaker figurehead as president if they had confidence that a trustworthy No. 2 was increasingly running things and ready to step in at a moment’s notice. Instead, Harris has hemorrhaged staff, become a figure of mirth for the rambling platitudes of her public remarks, and found herself conspicuously assigned only tasks that were already doomed to failure. Nobody in this administration treats her as if they respect her.

 

Worse, because Harris was chosen in large part for her demographic profile as a black woman — certainly not for her accomplishments, her political success, or her talents, none of which recommend her for any serious job — it is politically painful for Democrats either to replace her on the ticket or pass her over if they replace Biden. Live by identity politics, die by it slowly.

 

Trump and Republicans could take three lessons from this spectacle, two of them wise and one of them crassly self-interested. For the nation, a stronger, more capable vice president would make it easier and less painful to replace the president. For Democrats, Harris has left them handcuffed to a man who is unfit for the job. But for Biden, Harris has proven a personal insurance policy in the last extremity, stunting thus far the momentum of efforts to get him to step aside.

 

In 2016, Trump took the wise path and chose Mike Pence. While he offered Trump short-term advantages with particular constituencies, those advantages were secondary to his main qualifications: He was a good man and one obviously capable and prepared to step in if needed. Pence helped Trump win and helped him govern. Trump, for reasons that do him no credit, wants no further part of Pence and is leery of anyone too much like him. Indeed, he has induced vice-presidential hopefuls to excuse and defend his campaign to overturn the 2020 election.

 

Pence remains, however, a better model than Harris.

 

Like Biden, the 78-year-old Trump could benefit from reassuring an electorate uneasy about his age. He needs to appeal to voters who do not trust him but are ready to be done with Biden or Harris if they can get comfortable with the alternative. Unlike Biden, Trump’s intraparty position is nearly unchallengeable. Having survived two impeachments, four indictments, a conviction, and vigorous primary challenges, he knows that no running mate could rally the party against him. Being term-limited by the 22nd Amendment if he wins, he — unlike Biden — could govern without concern for reelection.

 

There are reasons to be concerned by a Trump so unconstrained, but this also means that he can — if he chooses to — run and govern with confidence that he need not focus narrowly on preserving his own position. He can afford to take a broader view, one that aids him in this election and benefits the country.

 

We hope that Trump chooses wisely.

Democrats Have Become What They Claim to Hate

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 02, 2024

 

Joe Biden’s infirmities and their contributions to the president’s maladroit performance have imposed a paradox on the country. The Democratic Party has been reduced to making the negative case for Biden — not that he is a particularly adept president or that his presence in the Oval Office is desirable in itself, but that he is a better steward of the executive branch than Donald Trump. That wouldn’t be a remarkable strategy for an unpopular incumbent save the fact that the incumbent and his movement increasingly mirror all that they despise about Trump.

 

With barely concealed self-satisfaction, Democratic partisans observed throughout the Trump years as the GOP talked itself into backing their party’s unfit nominee by indulging a variety of wild hypotheticals. Joe Biden will “destroy the suburbs,” Donald Trump warned. He had set out to “kill the American Dream,” “dismantle your police departments,” and take a torch to so many American institutions that “you won’t have a country anymore.” Trump’s supporters mimicked his rhetorical overreach, adopting his presuppositions and taking them to their logical, if extreme, conclusions.

 

Today, Joe Biden’s supporters are busily convincing themselves that similarly apocalyptic outcomes are inevitable in a Trump restoration. And they’re doing so with utter disregard for how they look to less passionate observers. Joe Biden has long warned that “democracy is at stake” on November 5, and predictions of America’s inevitable descent into autocracy if Trump is reelected have become a staple of his supporters’ rhetoric. But the Supreme Court’s circumspect verdict defining the parameters of presidential immunity has given Biden acolytes new license to indulge their wildest fantasies. Trump, they say, has just been handed license to order the extrajudicial murder of his opponents, cancel elections, and take bribes with impunity.

 

To the uninitiated ear, this sounds like hyperbole fueled by hyper-partisanship, panic, and limited familiarity with the Court’s ruling. As with Trump’s movement, however, the true believers see themselves as Cassandras cursed with foreknowledge of our fates.

 

Likewise, Biden’s most prominent supporters have adopted tactics designed to shield their party’s president from accountability. The president’s handlers are doing their best to keep Joe Biden out of the public eye, operating under the justifiable assumption that the candidate most likely to lose the race is the candidate with the most exposure. That was the same assumption on which Trump’s handlers operated.

 

“I think what Biden was trying to say” has become a lamentably ubiquitous feature of partisan Democratic discourse. Surely, in their quiet moments, the critics who mocked the obligation the former president’s backers felt that led them to translate Trump’s syntactically garbled half-thoughts into English must lament their own devolution.

 

Biden’s allies have taken to defending the campaign’s principal not by expressing faith in his judgment but by touting the more responsible Democrats with whom the president is surrounded. “I would take Joe Biden’s worst day at age 89,” former Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson said Tuesday, “so long as he has people around him like Avril Haines, Samantha Power, Gina Raimondo supporting him.” The notion that Trump’s appointees and staffers diligently saved the president from acting on his worst impulses was promulgated relentlessly by enterprising Republicans appealing to more skeptical quarters of the electorate. And even when those Republicans failed to keep Trump in check, the former president’s fans argued, lingering doubts in the president’s judgment should be quelled by his demonstrable talent for judging the character of his appointees. Sound familiar?

 

Similarly, the Democratic Party’s warnings about the threat Trump poses to the American civic compact were long ago denuded by Joe Biden’s actions. Democrats warn that Trump will head a lawless administration, but that admonition rings hollow after three years in which the president has repeatedly admitted that the actions he was taking were beyond his constitutional remit. From extending amnesty to migrants, to abrogating property rights, to transferring individual debt burdens onto the taxpaying public, Biden has repeatedly — indeed, boastfully — flouted the rule of law and the courts that enforce it.

 

Even the chaos at the street level in the Trump years that Biden’s grandfatherly demeanor was meant to remedy has persisted. Voters could be forgiven for thinking that — like Trump — the menacing mobs threatening social comity enjoyed a particular latitude because the president lacked the will or impulse to rein them in. How many hours have the president and his supporters devoted to mollycoddling the disruptive, vandalistic, sometimes violent anti-Israel demonstrators in America’s streets and on its college campuses? And toward what end, save that the president’s team made the cold calculation that it could not afford to alienate even the most grotesque barnacles that cling to the underside of the party’s coalition? Why should persuadable voters see that impulse as distinct from the one to distinguish the hooligans from the “very fine people“?

 

All this is rendered odder by the fact that Democrats know none of these tactics worked for Donald Trump or his associates. These are acts of desperation. They do not forestall the inevitable — indeed, they may hasten it. But what other course is available with Methuselah ensconced at the top of the ticket? It’s not just that the Biden campaign can no longer draw a compelling contrast with Trump. It’s that his administration has actively diluted the contrasts it wielded successfully in 2020.

 

And then, to add insult to injury, when the president appeared at the lectern yesterday to denounce the Supreme Court (another unflattering parallel), his complexion had transformed into an unsettling shade of orange. Voters are not short on metaphors for Biden’s degeneration, but his physical transformation into the figure Democrats most oppose must rank near the top of that list.

The Politics of Cooties, Again

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, July 03, 2024

 

I like Cornel West. His politics are stupid in the way very smart people very often have stupid politics, and his record on Israel’s response to the unprovoked massacre (and mass kidnapping, and organized rape) of its citizens by Hamas has been indefensible. There isn’t any need for him to wait until after he has lost his quixotic presidential campaign to apologize for it—no time like the present. 

 

But there is the matter of cooties that needs addressing. 

 

I have written before—too much already, I think—about the politics of cooties. The politics of cooties is what makes compromise and consensus-building impossible in Washington: the notion that an idea, or a piece of legislation, or even a figure of speech becomes infected when it is taken up by the other side, by … them. That was the case made against that self-abasing dope from California who used to be speaker of the House by that beady-eyed dope from Georgia who led the effort to oust him: that he relied on Democratic support to get certain things done. That’s the case the beady-eyed dope from Georgia is trying to make against a gutless dope from Louisiana currently serving as speaker of the House: You can’t use Democrats’ votes to pass a bill—those votes have cooties!

 

Getting members of the other party to support one’s own priorities in Congress once was a sign that you were what the old-timers used to call “good at politics.” If you happened to be the speaker of the House with, say, a six-vote majority in a party populated partly by gap-toothed yokels from Toad Suck, Arkansas—actually, the gentleman who represents Toad Suck seems like a pretty normal old-fashioned Republican, a former president of the Little Rock Rotary Club and chairman of the local chamber of commerce, but you know what I mean—then you could avoid being held hostage by the dumbest and most intransigent members of your own party. How? By giving a little something to the other party. By passing bills that were (if you were really good) 80 percent stuff you cared about and 20 percent stuff they cared about. Being in the majority still meant mostly getting your way, but having 50 percent plus one didn’t make you a temporary dictator. Everybody’s bread got buttered, which wasn’t always great for public finances but helped to get things done. 

 

You know that scene at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers where Donald Sutherland (RIP) points and shrieks at his former friend in Washington, revealing in the process that he has been body-snatched? That’s the treatment Cornel West is getting from the low-rent shills over at MoveOn. 

 

(MoveOn is the textbook example of an organization that has outlived its purpose. Founded more than a quarter-century ago to argue that the country needed to “move on” from Bill Clinton’s intern-diddling impeachment drama, it had two things that confer a very long life in American politics: office space and a good fundraising list. And so, while the country has moved on, MoveOn hasn’t. Which is weird, but this is America.) 

 

The problem, from MoveOn’s point of view, is that Professor West is doing business with people who also do business with Republicans, relying on GOP-aligned political professionals for his ballot-access operations: “Cornel West Caught AGAIN Relying on Republican Operatives To Get on the Ballot,” the headline huffs. Retreating to its fainting couch, MoveOn notes that the professionals the West campaign has hired in Arizona worked with Blake Masters, one of those blue-suited money-monkeys that billionaire Peter Thiel has tried to attach to the body politic from time to time. (Masters, former COO of Thiel Capital and president of the Thiel Foundation, is the guy who lost that Senate race to Democrat Mark Kelly last time around.) So, there’s your Muppet News Flash: A guy trying to do some politics hired some people who have done that kind of thing before. 

 

Well, raise my rent. 

 

That outrage makes sense only if you accept the politics of cooties the way a kindergartener accepts the more general epidemiology of cooties. West wants to be on the ballot in Arizona. Somebody can get him on the ballot for $x, where $x < y (where y is what the campaign has to spend on Arizona ballot access). It’s a no-brainer. Now, the MoveOn guys may or may not be cootie true-believers—maybe they’re just trying to shame everybody out of the race who might take a vote from Joe Biden. (“Maybe.”) Although, in a sense, even that kind of “binary choice” horsepucky is founded on cooties politics: If his campaign might be good for Republicans, then Cornel West’s campaign has cooties, never mind who he is or what he believes.

 

You’d be surprised how much this kind of thing infests the political world—including the nonprofit and campaign world—even at the operational level. I’ve seen substantial contracts awarded to perfectly nice people not particularly good at the task at hand over better-qualified alternatives because the nice guys have the right kind of politics, because they were on the right side, the right sort of people. That only makes sense from a cooties-centric point of view. 

 

It’s convenient, of course. The politics of cooties saves partisans the trouble of thinking. If you are on the right and there is some unpleasant news in the New York Times, you can just say, “Well, it’s the New York Times, I don’t believe it.” You don’t have to engage with the argument or the facts. Likewise with progressives and right-leaning media. When I point out that the Washington Post won a Pulitzer for error-ridden and wildly inaccurate reporting on firearms issues, they can just dismiss it as coming from the wrong sort of critic and brazen it out. So far, so good for them. 

 

There was a time when these things were a matter of honor and reputation. But who needs honor and reputation when the other guys all have cooties? 

It’s Democrats’ Turn to Make the Hard Decision

The Dispatch

Tuesday, July 02, 2024

 

Jill Biden told Vogue magazine on Sunday that her husband “will continue to fight” to remain the Democratic nominee for president and then, in the same breath, declared that he “will always do the right thing for the country.” That these two statements directly contradict each other is obvious to anyone who watched last Thursday’s presidential debate or has paid even casual attention to the long-accumulating public evidence of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.

 

And yet a number of prominent and influential Democrats, led by those closest to the president, would have the country believe he’s just fine. “If we’re just talking about mental acuity, let’s be fair about it,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on CNN over the weekend. “We see Joe Biden up close. We know how attuned he is to the issues, how informed he is.” Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina told reporters last week there’s “no better Democrat” than Biden to lead the party into November’s general election. 

 

Such water-carrying continues a theme in Democratic spin: Biden is sharp and attentive in private, but not in public. This is an affront to common sense that would be dubbed “gaslighting” if used in defense of Donald Trump. Is Biden choosing to keep his vigilance and cunning hidden from public view, like Phil Hartman’s Ronald Reagan? Has he, after spending more than 50 of his 81 years on this Earth in politics, contracted sudden-onset shyness or a kind of cognition-impairing agoraphobia? Maybe the most straightforward answer is also the correct one: He’s slowing down, and his decline has been accelerated by three-and-a-half years in arguably the most stressful job known to man.

 

Elected Democrats and their allies in the media have made a habit over the past decade of spotlighting their Republican counterparts’ cowardice, and they’ve been right to do so. Presented with ample opportunities over the years to stand up to the demagogue who hijacked their party and their movement, the vast majority of GOP lawmakers and right-wing pundits opted time and again for political expediency, self-preservation, and the path of least resistance. They’ve sacrificed their principles, abandoned the importance of decency and honor, and contributed to the spread of dangerous lies—because to do otherwise might cost them an election, their audience, or their proximity to power.

 

Democrats like Pelosi have had no problem diagnosing such gutlessness when it comes with an R next to its name. “This is about being afraid,” she said last summer about then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s efforts to retroactively expunge Donald Trump’s impeachments. “These people look pathetic.” Implicit in such criticism is the idea that her party would never stoop to such a level.

 

But now faced with a collective-action problem of their own, most leading Democrats’ moral clarity has vanished. Several prominent media figures have broken from the party line, but the ongoing effort by Biden’s allies to shut down legitimate questions about the president’s clearly deteriorating faculties—as well as his ability to carry out his current job responsibilities—is as shameless and irresponsible as just about anything Trump and his enablers have done over the past eight years. And if Biden refuses to step aside, it’d be an act of political selfishness surpassed in recent memory only by Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election.

 

In press releases and on cable news, the Biden campaign has repeatedly insisted that “90 minutes does not negate three-and-a-half years of results.” Setting aside that fewer than 4 in 10 voters approve of those “results” and only 1 in 4 believe the country is on the right track, a second term in office is not a reward for a job well done. No, presidential elections are forward-looking, and this coming November’s contest will be a referendum on whether the incumbent can effectively do the job for another four years. He cannot.

 

Discussing last week’s debate, around The Dispatch’s office and with friends beyond work, we’ve been struck by how many people—how many of us—have dealt with a situation like the one facing the Bidens. Anyone who’s witnessed cognitive decline in elderly friends and relatives has heard the phrase “good days and bad days.” It comes up when loved ones are discussing a potential move to assisted-living facilities, or when they’re making the difficult decision to take the car keys from someone who shouldn’t be driving.

 

Joe Biden, by all accounts, has good days and bad days. On good days, he is reportedly “dependably engaged” between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. On bad days, he wanders off, or freezes up, or reads the word “pause” aloud from his teleprompter. For those who have tuned into a handful of Biden’s public appearances in recent years, his inability on Thursday to string together multiple sentences—and his false claim that no U.S. troops have died during his presidency—came as no surprise.

 

Republicans have certainly exploited such “senior moments” for their own partisan purposes, but that does not magically render them unimportant or irrelevant—quite the opposite. World leaders reportedly have serious worries about Biden’s ability to keep up with discussions during international summits, and members of Congress from both parties have described a noticeably slower version of the president in recent months.

 

Some Democrats, like Rep. Ro Khanna of California, have dismissed such concerns by pointing to the people who would be surrounding Biden in a second term. But as our colleague Kevin Williamson points out, we elect presidents in this country, not prime ministers. And with a host of new challenges and the threat to Pax Americana arguably the highest it’s been in decades, the United States needs—and deserves—a leader who can be reliably counted on to answer those 3 a.m. calls.

 

Donald Trump—for too many reasons to count—is not that leader, either. Yet if Biden stubbornly decides to plow ahead, the former president will almost assuredly find himself back in the White House come January. A CBS News poll conducted after last week’s debate found that 72 percent of registered voters believe Biden does not have the “mental and cognitive health” to serve as president, and that 46 percent of Democratic voters believe Biden should not continue his 2024 campaign. Election analyst Nate Silver’s latest model shows Biden with just a 28 percent chance of securing another term, and he predicts that figure “will get worse” for the president in the coming weeks and months.

 

***

 

Democrats have been raising the alarm for eight years about the distinct threat Trump poses to the country and the constitutional order. They were right in 2016. They were right in 2020. And they’re right today.

 

But party leaders are not behaving in a manner consistent with those dire warnings. If the stakes of this election genuinely are as high as people like Nancy Pelosi say they are—that the future of democracy itself is in peril—Joe Biden must relinquish the Democratic nomination for president and allow himself to be replaced by someone capable of campaigning for the presidency and running the executive branch of the federal government.

 

Such maneuvering is certainly not without risks. Swapping Biden out now would require Democratic leaders and the party’s boosters in the media to admit, explicitly or implicitly, that they lied to the American people—for years—about the president’s condition. And if Biden is not fit to run for reelection, a good-faith argument could be made that he’s not fit to serve as president right now, either. There’s also no guarantee that the candidate who emerges from extended party infighting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer—with whom we expect we would have profound policy disagreements—will be able to pull together the increasingly fractured coalition necessary to keep Trump from the White House.

 

But that is almost beside the point.

 

Admitting that the current situation is untenable—and trying to do something about it—would represent a small act of political courage in an era that is desperately crying out for some. With increasingly few exceptions, politicians and pundits in Washington haven’t truly leveled with the American people—about Biden and Trump, about debt and deficits, about the separation of powers and the proper role of government—in years. Acknowledging that an 81-year-old man in clear cognitive decline should not be in charge of the most powerful military in world history would be a start.

 

And if Biden is truly intent on doing the right thing for the country as the first lady claimed, he has a difficult—but obvious—decision to make.

Villains of History

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, July 01, 2024

 

A useful way to think about the presidential election is in terms of the three I’s—inflation, immigration, and infirmity.

 

All three are momentous political problems for Joe Biden. Against a strong Republican candidate, each one in isolation might be fatal.

 

Against a mediocre Republican, one might be survivable but perhaps not two. Incumbency is a powerful advantage, yet not so powerful that it can’t be overcome by a minimally competent challenger with solid material to work with. That was the lesson of 2020.

 

Against Donald Trump, any two of the three might be survivable. Swing voters will look for excuses not to restore a maniac to power, after all. They might have credited an aged Joe Biden who had lost control of the border for the roaring economy and low cost of living, or for securing the border if the economy were sluggish and inflation high. Or, with a double whammy of rising inflation and immigration weighing him down, they might have pointed to the president’s comparative good health and cogency as reasons to give him the benefit of the doubt over whatever the hell this is.

 

But when all three of the three I’s are weighing him down?

 

The irony of the three I’s is that the one that’s least under Biden’s control as a practical matter is the only one that remained somewhat under his control as a political matter as of last week. He’s never been able to do much about inflation; he could have done something about immigration but allowed that ship to sail long ago. So he was left trying to manage public perceptions of his infirmity, which made Thursday’s debate crucial. Voters dislike Trump enough that they might have accepted a 90-minute simulacrum of vigor by the president as proof that he’s not as infirm as he sometimes appears.

 

Instead:

He can’t win anymore. Not even against Trump.

 

Rather than face that fact and do what little they can to avert the looming civic catastrophe they helped engineer, Joe Biden and his entourage of relatives, cronies, and parasites seem prepared to try to brazen it out until Election Day. I’ve written about the Republican hostage crisis many times; four days removed from last week’s debate, America is now trapped in a Democratic hostage crisis. With the president himself as the captor-in-chief.

 

Through their vanity, hubris, and lust for power, he and his team are going to bring about a second Trump administration and the sustained constitutional crisis that will inevitably follow.

 

In time, they’ll be seen as villains of history.

 

***

 

Frankly, at this point, they’ll be seen as villains of history even if Biden drops out tomorrow.

 

Only his inner circle knows how long he’s resembled the man we saw onstage on Thursday more so than the man who does a serviceable job reading the State of the Union teleprompter every February, but leaks have started to spring since the debate. This weekend Axios reported that Jill Biden and several top aides “took steps early in his term to essentially rope off the president” from the White House’s residential staff.

 

A separate Axios story cited sources who claim that Biden is reliably present and engaged each day from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. but that he’s more likely to become “fatigued” outside those hours. Which sounds suspiciously like sundowning.

 

Foreign diplomats and Democratic donors also have begun whispering to the press about episodes that concerned them, with one donor left “shaken” at a fundraiser last September after the president told the same anecdote twice.

 

“This was all predictable, and it pisses me off that everyone is acting shocked now,” one Democratic operative told the Wall Street Journal about the uproar over Biden’s debate performance. “The shocking thing is that people engaged in this deception, or delusion, or both, for so long.”

 

Why so many went on engaging in that deception/delusion long after much of the public had already lost faith in Biden’s mental wherewithal is a fascinating psychological question, but one partial explanation is that the White House browbeat those who refused. “Biden’s allies worked behind the scenes to stave off a potential primary challenge, making clear that politicians and operatives who contemplated one would be summarily blackballed,” the Journal reported. “Reporters and commentators who pointed out the obvious got similar treatment, berated in public and private and accused of helping Trump return to the White House.”

 

By early 2023 it was clear that Biden’s predecessor as president would be a formidable candidate for the office again. After Trump’s lead in the Republican primary soared following his first indictment in Manhattan in late March, Biden and his team had every reason to take seriously the possibility of a second MAGA administration. If they knew the president was in serious decline—more so even than was obvious from his public appearances—that was the moment for them to do something good for their party and for their country by revealing the truth and clearing the way for a more competitive nominee.

 

They didn’t. In the end, “our democracy” meant less to them than Joe Biden’s vanity and their own job security. For the second time in this era, the solemnly held principles of a political party’s leadership turned out to be a lie. We all already suspected it, but now we know for sure.

 

We’re left today with a hostage crisis and an election in which the outcome can only be terrible to greater or lesser degrees.

 

***

 

The least bad outcome is one in which Biden is replaced and his replacement defeats Trump. But that replacement is likely to be Kamala Harris, a vice president who isn’t well liked and in whom no one has much confidence. Thanks to the White House’s villainy, she’ll now have all of four months—at most—to try to rally a leery electorate around her. Her presidency would be haunted by perceptions that she was a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency nominee by a party that didn’t really want her.

 

The next best outcome is Biden hanging in there and winning somehow, giving us a second term in which an already enfeebled president will grow increasingly incapacitated and quite possibly be unable to complete his term. Having seen his true condition on display at the debate, America’s enemies will seek to take full advantage.

 

The worst outcome is, well, you know. It also happens to be the most likely outcome.

 

Joe Biden controls enough delegates to ensure his party’s nomination and so, unless and until he withdraws, Democrats and the broader anti-Trump coalition are a hostage to his whims. Even if there were a way to force him off the ticket, there’d be no non-divisive way to do so and not enough time before November for the party to repair the divisions it had created. So Biden can and probably will insist on fighting on to Election Day as the Democratic nominee even as his polling disintegrates and he suffers further humiliating “senior moments” in public, which he will certainly do.

 

If instead he chose to withdraw, he’d throw his party into the unprecedented chaos of a nominee dropping out shortly before the election. Desperate liberals would scramble to try to find a plausible last-second alternative to Harris before inevitably concluding that they can’t, achieving nothing in the process except to further undermine her publicly. Already, in fact, Biden officials are warning donors that Harris would control most of the campaign’s war chest if he drops out, which sounds less like a statement of fact than a warning about the dire consequences if they abandon him.

 

But it doesn’t look like he intends to drop out. The president discussed the state of the campaign with his family this weekend at Camp David and, wouldn’t you know it, the same people who have been using him as a gravy train for all their lives want him to hang in there and roll the dice on one more term. “One of the strongest voices imploring Mr. Biden to resist pressure to drop out was his son Hunter Biden,” the New York Times reported, which is true to the spirit of this wretched era in politics. At this point, why wouldn’t the fate of American democracy hinge on the selfish interests of a grifting crackhead?

 

The logic of hostage-taking has suffused Biden’s operation so entirely in the last 72 hours that the campaign is allegedly gaming out how to force the party to unify behind him. “They know Biden just needs to make it to the Democratic convention in Chicago, which opens eight weeks from today,” Axios wrote of the president’s advisers. “After that, unity is the only choice.”

 

And what if he faints at a campaign appearance in October or lapses into a fugue state during his September debate with Trump? You just read the answer: Unity is the only choice.

 

Except it isn’t. It might be for strong Democratic partisans and for diehard anti-Trumpers like me but there aren’t enough of us to drag the old man over the finish line. Biden needs swing voters too. And each time another “senior moment” happens, and they will, he’ll lose more of them.

 

The president can’t win with three I’s hanging around his neck. But Jill Biden might get another Vogue cover or two before he leaves office if he stays on the ticket, which I guess is what’s really important.

 

Biden’s operatives let greed, pride, and fear of irrelevance steer them into a campaign they had every reason to know would implode, and by so doing they’re going to end up midwifing a fascist succession in the White House. They’re not villains of history to the degree that Republican voters, the supreme political villains of this era, are.

 

But they’re villains all the same. And realistically there’s not enough time left for them to do anything about it.

 

***

 

This tweet from Dartmouth College political science professor Brendan Nyhan caught my attention.

Nyhan’s analogy isn’t perfect, as Biden is a sitting president whose views on policy are in line with those of his party’s establishment and Trump in 2016 very much was not. The difference between Republican officials failing to stop him then and Democratic officials failing to stop Biden in 2024 is the difference between not putting down an insurrection and starting one.

 

But if it isn’t perfect, it’s uncomfortably close to being true for those of us who ditched the GOP in order to align with liberals in what we thought was common cause against a mutual illiberal enemy. The Democratic hostage crisis that the Biden campaign has created resembles the Republican hostage crisis that alienated conservatives like me in more ways than one.

 

In both cases, extreme media malpractice helped bring it about. In 2016 that malpractice took the form of too much coverage for Donald Trump during the Republican primary, making him the “main character” of the race and gifting him with earned media worth literally billions of dollars. In 2024 the press had the opposite problem: Whether because of self-delusion, partisan bias, or bullying by the White House, the media failed to expose the extent of Biden’s decline until it was laid shockingly bare at the debate.

 

The cowardice of party chieftains is another common denominator. In 2016, establishment Republicans knew that their populist base despised them and that the party would fracture if they moved in unison to try to quash a Trump nomination. They opted to bite their tongues and play along with him instead, believing that he’d lose to Hillary Clinton and that the grassroots would learn a hard lesson about electability before everything got back to normal. And now here we are.

 

Establishment Democrats are biting their tongues after last week’s debate too but not (mostly) because they fear a revolt from below. They fear retribution from above. Biden is the leader of the party and its nominee for president until he chooses not to be; calling on him to drop out will offend him, invite reprisals, draw accusations that the critic isn’t a “team player,” and require an embarrassing reversal if he decides to stick it out such that “unity is the only choice” come November.

 

There’s a third way that the two crises are similar. Both demonstrate the pathologically toxic psychology of devout partisanship.

 

In the case of Republicans, that toxicity is a daily preoccupation of this newsletter. For the sake of maintaining populist control of the GOP and encouraging unity behind its leader, the grassroots right has resolved to excuse or defend literally anything Donald Trump does, no matter how malign. As I said: The supreme political villains of this era.

 

But many Democrats spent the last few days enabling Biden’s hostage-taking by descending into nasty “join or die” partisanship of their own. Few former Republicans have endeared themselves to liberals more completely since 2016 than Tim Miller of The Bulwark, who wrote a bestselling book of regrets describing how he and his former party paved the way for Trump’s ascendance. Yet Miller was attacked repeatedly from the left on social media this weekend for finding Biden’s debate performance mortifying and demanding that Democrats stop gaslighting Americans (not to mention their own donors) about the president’s condition.

 

As a result, for the first time since 2016, a rift is forming in the anti-Trump coalition between the left and center-right that boils down to tribalism. People like Miller, yours truly, and many members of The Dispatch staff shed our partisan loyalties years ago and have since grown to despise political tribalism as it turns uglier and more idiotic. Despite my rooting interest in the election, my judgment about what’s politically useful for the candidate I intend to support—Joe Biden just had a bad night!—will not influence my belief in what’s true. There’s already a party that specializes in that and I’ll never be part of it again.

 

But many partisan Democrats feel differently. They’re on a team, now and always. And they resent it terribly when some of the players take to undermining the coach in public, even if the coach is drooling on himself—especially if the coach is drooling on himself. If you’re not willing to engage in a bit of calculated emperor’s-new-clothes denial about Biden’s cognitive wherewithal at a fraught moment, what are you doing on this team in the first place?

 

What a political coup it’ll be for the villains of history if, by foolishly persisting with this doomed candidacy, they manage to set the pro-democracy movement at each other’s throats and lead it to splinter into camps of those who think Joe Biden can’t win, that he can win but is in no condition to govern for five more years, and that he can win and will muddle through a second term somehow, magically.

 

That’ll be a productive use of the next four months of the campaign. And all because the president has convinced himself that he’s an indispensable man, of whom the graveyards are full.

 

***

 

When I was younger and heard references to “the stupid party and the evil party,” I didn’t know which was which. Or maybe I did know and, being a conservative, resented the suggestion that I was evil for voting Republican.

 

Now that I’m older and have lived through this era, I understand how evil the evil party is. And this past week has reminded me how stupid the stupid party is.

 

It’s indescribably stupid as a political matter for Democrats to persist with Biden as their nominee after that debate. Their strategy for winning was to try to turn the race into a referendum on Trump’s fitness for office. Instead they’ve turned it into a referendum on Biden’s fitness, with every nail-biting verbal hiccup on the campaign trail for the next four months destined to reignite the “how far gone is he?” debate.

 

He and his operation might move heaven and earth for weeks to come in order to convince reluctant liberals to circle the wagons around him—only for him to trip and fall at a rally or wander around during a public appearance or what have you.

 

Every bit of goodwill they might regain through sheer partisan exertion can be lost in an instant. And, at some point, almost assuredly will.

 

Then, after it happens and Trump is handed a second term on a silver platter, the president’s party will engage in the most ferociously bitter political recriminations of our lifetimes. As vicious as I thought those would be before Biden’s horrific debate, it’ll be an order of magnitude worse now. The president, his family, his advisers, Democratic leaders, the media—no one will be spared from accountability for their role in maneuvering America into an election in which reelecting a demagogic coup-plotting felon became the “responsible” thing to do. They could have stopped this candidacy months or years ago. They knew the stakes. They refused.

 

Everyone will recognize them as the villains of history that they are.